And in the code in C it looks like this, which is also a proper solution, I did not measure the time, it took me to write that.
name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name");
if (!name) name = SOME_DEFAULT;
name = cgiGetValue (cgi, "name") ?: SOME_DEFAULT;
That would fail on a user supplying a multiple where you don't expect.
> If multiple fields are used (i.e. a variable that may contain several values) the value returned contains all these values concatenated together with a newline character as separator.
In GP’s defense, there is no standard behavior in the spec for handling repeated GET query parameters. Therefore any implementation-defined behavior is reasonable, including: keeping only the first, keeping only the last, keeping one at random, allowing access to all of them, concatenating them all with a separator, discarding the entire thing, etc.
Why? The actual implementation of cgiGetValue I am talking about does exactly that:
> concatenated together with a newline character