Is “(” or “)” a special character for PHP/CodeIgniter?

Question

Where i came across at first while i was push a file to the header to download it.

Now it works just fine. However, whenever one of my files has an "(" or ")" in the name, the push doesn't work.

// required for IE
        if(ini_get('zlib.output_compression')) { ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off'); }

        // Build the headers to push out the file properly.
        header('Pragma: public');     // required
        header('Expires: 0');         // no cache
        header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
        header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate ('D, d M Y H:i:s', filemtime ($path)).' GMT');
        header('Cache-Control: private',false);
        header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');  // Add the mime type from Code igniter.
        header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($name).'"');  // Add the file name
        header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
        header('Content-Length: '.filesize($path)); // provide file size
        header('Connection: close');
        readfile($path); // push it out
        exit();

It will simply excecute the exit() and will give a black page. Now I thought this was a character that i had to escape. I've tried to escape it with:

str_replace('(', '\\(', $name);

This didn't seem to work. Now i've tried to atleast get rid of the "(" to see if my replace function actually reacts to the "(" character. So i wanted to simply delete out of the string.

$newstring = str_replace('(', '', $name);
echo $newstring;

Now what's strange about this is that is doesnt seems to do anything. Even more strange is when i do this:

$name = 'test(ol';
$newstring = str_replace('(', '', $name);
echo $newstring;

It actually does work!

This is where i get my $name from:

$name = end($this->uri->segments);

So it seems like my Uri segment is an object or something, atleast it doesn't act as a real string?

I hope I was clear enough. Thanks in advance, Nkmol.

Example text name:

test(2)

Function

function download()
{
    $this->load->helper('download');
    $path = ''; //default waarde

    //zet de uri segments in een array
    $aPath = $this->uri->uri_to_assoc(3);

    //zet de segment array om in een nieuwe path, zo word de current directory gesaved in een variable
    //de laast segment hoeft geen "/" achter, laaste segment van de volledige url
    $i = 0;
    $len = count($aPath);

    foreach($aPath as $key => $value) :
        if ($i == $len - 1)
        {
            $path .= $key .  DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $value;
        }
        else
        {
            $path .= $key .  DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $value .  DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR;
        }
        $i++;
    endforeach;

    $pathEdit = substr($path, -1);
    if($pathEdit == '/' || $pathEdit == '\\')
    {
        $path = substr_replace($path,"", -1);
    }


    //$data = file_get_contents($path); // Read the file's contents
    $name = end($this->uri->segments); //haal de file naam op(laaste segment in de uri)
    //echo $blub;
    $this -> push_file($path, $name);

    //force_download($name, $data);
}

function push_file($path, $name)
{
    // check of het een path is en niet een folder
    if(is_file($path))
    {
        // required for IE
        if(ini_get('zlib.output_compression')) { ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off'); }

        // Build the headers to push out the file properly.
        header('Pragma: public');     // required
        header('Expires: 0');         // no cache
        header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
        header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate ('D, d M Y H:i:s', filemtime ($path)).' GMT');
        header('Cache-Control: private',false);
        header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');  // Add the mime type from Code igniter.
        header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'. basename($name).'"');  // Add the file name
        header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
        header('Content-Length: '.filesize($path)); // provide file size
        header('Connection: close');
        readfile($path); // push it out
        exit();

        //str_replace('"', '\\"', basename($file)) . '"')
        //str_replace('(', '\(', basename($file)) . '"')
    }
}

Answer 1

Do one thing I just came across a similar problem, in your application/config/config.php :

$config['permitted_uri_chars'] = 'a-z 0-9~%.:_\-()';

See the () at the end of the string.

Answer 2

From the var_dump output, it appears that your filename is stored as HTML entities. You can use html_entity_decode() to get the actual filename. Once you have the filename, you can do an str_replace() on the string as you tried to do before:

$name = end($this->uri->segments);
$name = html_entity_decode($name);
$newstring = str_replace('(', '', $name);
//convert it back to HTML entities if necessary