cgiGetValue(3)

💖 cgiGetValue — bestie, let's get that value 💖

okay so this one lives in the cgiGetValue(3) page of the programmer's manual, and it's literally the little function that goes and grabs a CGI variable's value for you. no cap, it's a whole vibe. 🌸

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✨ NAME ✨

cgiGetValue — return the value of a CGI variable 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSYS ✨

#include <cgi.h>

char *cgiGetValue (s_cgi *parms, const char *name);

(it's giving "short and iconic", we love to see it 💅)

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this routine hands you back a pointer to the value of a cgi variable. 🫶 and listen — any encoded characters (%nn) are already decoded by the time you get them, so you don't have to do a single thing about it. obsessed.

not me warning you: you must not free that pointer. don't do it. put the free() down bestie. 🛑

if multiple fields are used — like, a variable that may contain several values — the value you get back contains all of those values concatenated together, with a newline character as the separator. so yeah, one string, newlines between, that's the whole deal. ✨

and the memory allocated by that returned value? it gets automatically freed by the final call to cgiFree(3). so the library's got you, you don't have to babysit it. 😌

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✨ RETURN VALUE ✨

• on success, a pointer to a string is returned 👑
• if the variable wasn't transmitted through CGI, or it was empty, NULL is returned 💀

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

this CGI library is written by Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>. 🧚 and fr fr, if you have additions or improvements, please get in touch with him — he wants to hear from you.

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• cgiGetVariables(3)
• cgiGetCookie(3)
• cgiGetCookies(3)
• cgiDebug(3)
• cgiHeader(3)
• cgiInit(3)
• cgiFree(3)

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one's from the CGI Library, dated 6 April 2008 — yeah she's a lil vintage but she still ate. go forth and get those values 💜🦋✨