Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 10:45:28 -0500
From: David Allen <mda@idatar.com>
To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] Re: upload
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 from jgoerzen@complete.org on Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 10:34:15AM -0500
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On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 10:34:15AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> 
> "Jason J. Gullickson" <mr@jasongullickson.com> writes:
> 
> > Probably just another stupid newbie question, but does gopher
> > support any kind of upload functionality? 
> 
> Not AFAIK.

Well, yes, and no.

Using gopher, the answer is a definate no.  Using gopher+, the answer
is yes, you can, but you shouldn't because it's an ugly hack.

Gopher+ uses ASK blocks, which you could use to upload data.  Using
ASK blocks, you can have a text field which the user fills out and
sends back to the server.  The way this data gets sent to the server
is like this:

X
data
data
data

Where 'X' is the number of lines the client is sending, and 'data' is
the data in those lines.  So you could use this to send probably
arbitrary text files to the server, (as long as they didn't contain
'.' on a line by itself since that might screw some software up) and
you MIGHT even be able to get away with sending binary data this way
depending on the server and the client, but both of these things are
basically misuses of what ASK blocks were intended for.

There also isn't any software that does this "uploading" in an
automated fashion either, or any servers/ASK blocks that are expecting
entire files back to the best of my knowledge.

So yes, you can do it with Gopher+, but you probably shouldn't.

-- 
David Allen
http://opop.nols.com/
----------------------------------------
"So here's a picture of reality: (picture of circle with lots of sqiggles in it) As we all know, reality is a mess."
  -- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)