Passing State Information

Functions:

There are two client authentication functions:

• encode_pi() returns a magic-cookie string, using characters 0-9, a-z, A-Z, and %, that is an encoded version of an associative array.

  encode_pi() takes one argument, a reference to an associative array. (In perl, an associative array stores arbitrary key-value pairs, like this: $a{key}='value';.) Numbers and non-ascii values may be passed, though passing references in the array will not yield useful results on the other end.

• decode_pi() takes two arguments: a magic cookie string from encode_pi(), and a reference to an associative array. It returns true if the string can be validly decoded; if so, it fills up the array with exactly what was in the corresponding array passed to encode_pi().