[lug] e-mail addressing question

[Paul Bille]

> 90% of all web sites I've come across lately will reject or mangle email
addresses with an embedded plus sign.

Could be because HTML forms use the "+" sign to replace white space in
particular the blank character in the data stream sent back to the cgi-bin
application on the server.

Any good cgi-bin application should convert the "+" back to a white space
before they convert the %xx code indicating a true "+" in the data stream to
a plus.  You can imagine the consequences of getting that out of order.  If
you convert the %xx to a "+" and then convert "+" to space suddenly all "+"
in the input stream become blanks.

Paul
http://bille.cudenver.edu/author