Re: lynx-dev (OT) HTML Button Question

[Walter Ian Kaye]

At 08:06p -0700 01/20/2002, address@hidden didst inscribe upon 
an electronic papyrus:

> Ok.  Suppose (as in my real case) I have two different submit
> buttons, perhaps:
>
>     <input type=submit value="Preview">
>     <input type=submit value="Download">
>
> What do I put in the "hidden" input tag(s), and what gets sent
> to the server when the user clicks on the "Preview" button or on the
> "Download" button.

Well, that won't work for this because you wouldn't know which button 
had been pressed.

> I simply want to be able to decouple the text in the QUERY_STRING sent
> to the server from the text appearing at the browser.  I recognize that
> I could do this by making "Preview" and "Download" Options in YA
> separate Select list and providing a single Submit button, but this
> seems cumbersome for the user compared with having two distinct
> submittal buttons.

You could "encode" information into the value by padding it with 
&nbsp; -- pad each button with a different (but balanced) number of 
them, and then your CGI can count them. That way it won't matter what 
the text of the button was, because your script will only be looking 
at the padding around the text.
For example:

  <input type=submit name=act value="&nbsp;Preview&nbsp;">
  <input type=submit name=act value="&nbsp;&nbsp;Download&nbsp;&nbsp;">

I wrote a test script "submit.pl":

  #!/usr/bin/perl

  $x = '&nbsp;Preview&nbsp;';
  $y = '&nbsp;&nbsp;Download&nbsp;&nbsp;';
  $z = '&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Mail&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;';

  print scalar(split('&nbsp;', $x)), "\n";
  print scalar(split('&nbsp;', $y)), "\n";
  print scalar(split('&nbsp;', $z)), "\n";

I ran it and got this result:

>  perl submit.pl
2
3
4


HTH,
-Walter



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