View Subcategory
Strings
Printing

Output a string to the console

Write the string "Hello World!" to STDOUT
fsharp
printfn "Hello World!"

Retrieve a string containing ampersands from the variables in a url

My PHP script first does a query to obtain customer info for a form. The form has first name and last name fields among others. The customer has put entries such as "Ron & Jean" in the first name field in the database. Then the edit form script is called with variables such as

"http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=Ron & Jean&lname=Smith".

The script variable for first name $_REQUEST['firstname'] never gets beyond the "Ron" value because of the ampersand in the data.

I have tried various functions like urldecode but all to no avail. I even tried encoding the url before the view screen is painted so that the url looks like "http://myserver/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname="Ronxxnbsp;xxamp;xxnbsp;Jean"&lname=SMITH". (sorry I had to add the xx to replace the ampersand or it didn't display meaningful url contents the browser sees.)

Of course this fails for the same reasons. What is a better approach?
fsharp
//the problem arises due to the fact that you've attempted to apply HTML entities encoding rather than URL encoding to your data!
//in F#, for example, assuming you would call this function with fname and lname parameters, this would produce the desired output
let getProperUrl fname lname = sprintf "http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=%s&lname=%s" (HttpUtility.UrlEncode fname) (HttpUtility.UrlEncode lname)
// Example that shows encoding and decoding:
let queryString =
let fname = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Ron & James")
let lname = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Smith & Jones")
sprintf "http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=%s&lname=%s" fname lname
/// All parameters in the URL as a lookup map
let parameters =
let paramStart = queryString.IndexOf('?')
if paramStart < 0 then
Map.empty
else
let values =
queryString.Substring(paramStart + 1)
|> HttpUtility.ParseQueryString
values.AllKeys
|> Seq.map (fun key -> key, values.[key])
|> Map.ofSeq
let fname = parameters.TryFind("fname")
let lname = parameters.TryFind("lname")

string-wrap

Wrap the string "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. " repeated ten times to a max width of 78 chars, starting each line with "> "

Expected output:
> The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over t
> he lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox
> jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The qui
> ck brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
> dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps o
> ver the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.