cgiInit(3)

💖 cgiInit — the manual page, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, so we're doing cgiInit(3) today — a page from the Programmer's Manual, and honestly? it's a glow-up moment for your CGI code. let's get into it ✨

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🎀 NAME 🎀

cgiInit — initializes the CGI library. that's it, that's the job, and it does it flawlessly 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSYS 🌸

yes the original spells it like that, i'm not fixing it, i'm not that girl 🙈

#include <cgi.h>

s_cgi *cgiInit ();

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so this routine initializes the CGI routines. its main character activity is reading in and decoding CGI data so you can process it later. that's the whole vibe 💅

and here's the cute part: if your program isn't being called through the CGI interface, the user gets prompted to type in CGI variable bindings via stdin — just like CGI.pm does. so it works either way, no cap. and there is no limit in the number of variable bindings. none. go off 🍓

if HTTP Cookies are being used (through the variable HTTP_COOKIE), this routine will parse them too and assign them to internal variables. and again — no limit in the number of cookies. unlimited cookie energy 🌈

heads up, bestie: to actually set a cookie you have to use the cgiSetHeader(3) routine. it's not this one. don't come for me.

also, client behaviour is a whole thing: some clients allow 4kB of Cookies while others only allow short ones. and some clients may also allow only 200 Cookies for a certain domain/path pair. so like… know your audience, bestie 😭

this routine is normally the first or second one called from this library. only cgiDebug() may be called before it. and if debugging is enabled, this routine produces some additional output — extra chatter, we love that for it 🙈

the library supports both the regular GET and POST methods as well as multipart/form-data. versatile queen ⭐

and remember: memory allocated by this library gets freed with the cgiFree(3) function. don't ghost your malloc, that's not iconic 💀

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✨ RETURN VALUE ✨

• on success — you get back a set of CGI variable bindings, which you need for later processing 🫶
• if an error occurs — NULL is returned 😭

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

this CGI library is written by Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>. if you have additions or improvements, please get in touch with him. he's the blueprint, fr fr 💜

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• cgiDebug(3)
• cgiSetType(3)
• cgiSetHeader(3)
• cgiHeader(3)
• cgiGetValue(3)
• cgiGetVariables(3)
• cgiGetCookie(3)
• cgiGetCookies(3)
• cgiFree(3)
• cgi(5)

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and that's the page, bestie!! 🧚 this whole thing is the CGI Library, dated 6 April 2008 — absolute vintage icon behaviour, still slaying. mwah 💖