Well, Great Advise Robert.
I wasted a bit of time getting the javascript above to work.
It was flaky and sometimes didn't pass the Form Vars. ? So I changed tack:
I changed the Form Method from POST to GET so I could recover the long and complicated URL
the longest of which was 241 characters. Then I just used:
ns_returnredirect /the/very/long.tcl?character+string=241&characters=
And it works. It's a Kinda messy URL but hopefully users won't notice or care.
Maybe later, for extra credit I could develop an ns_returnredirect
that sends data as POST...
-Bob