forware only http payload to pool

Okay this is mostly working - the thing that is tripping me up I think is just Tcl syntax. I'm parsing the IP address in dotted decimal format (along with the port) and assigning them to variables:

 
 foreach val [split $qsVars] {  
 set qsName [getfield $val "=" 1] 
 set qsValue [decode_uri [getfield $val "=" 2]] 
 log local0. "\$val = $qsName, value = $qsValue"  
 switch -glob $qsName { 
 "data" { 
 set decoded_data [decode_uri $qsValue] 
 log local0.info "data = $decoded_data" 
 set vnc_payload $decoded_data 
 } 
 "host" { 
 set decoded_host [decode_uri $qsValue] 
 log local0.info "host = $decoded_host" 
 set remote_host $decoded_host 
 } 
 "\{port" { 
 set decoded_port [decode_uri $qsValue] 
 log local0.info "port = $decoded_port" 
 set remote_port $decoded_port 
 } 
 default { 
  
 } 
 } 
 } 
  
 

The variables I'm assigning, $remote_host and $remote_port, are defined globally so I am sure it's not a scope issue. but when I try to do a:

use node $remote_host $remote_port

The server-side handshake never fires. I think what is happening is that the node command doesn't like the format of the remote_host variable - if I manually set it to the same exact address that's being parsed above it works fine. Does Tcl have the concept of casting to a strong type? I'm more of an OO programmer so I get tripped up by these kinds of things in other languages. I'm also testing now to see if I have a leading or training space issue.