How to safely pass parameters in the url

Question

I am using urls like this parameters

http://localhost/articles/?author=Ben%20Cooper%2CAlex%20Hunter&title=.....&tags=..

I urlencode them in the links. This all works until there are special characters in the parameters.

For example

http://localhost/articles/?author=..&title=&tags=..

If, in title I have Love & Life, first time it encodes it has Love+%26+Life, sometimes it becomes Love+%26amp%3B+Life.

Why is this happening? I appreciate any help.

Answer 1

You need to use html_entity_decode() first. That will turn & (which is encoded for html, not urls) into & then unlencode() which will turn it into %26

HTML and URLs have different reserved chars and are encoded differently. A lot of frameworks will automatically encode html entities to help prevent your page from rendering oddly. Imagine you had < in a string, that could screw up the page when it was displayed so it will get echo'd to the html as < and the browser will render it as < instead of treating it as part of a tag.

You can't directly encode < into %3C ( < urlencoded) because it will think you literally want to encode < and not < this is why you need to make a pass through html_entity_decode()

Here is a code snippet:

$str = 'Love & Life'; //start with string that may or may not contain htmlentities
$decodedStr = html_entity_decode($str); //replace html entities with their literal counterparts
$urlEncodedStr = urlencode($decodedStr); //urlencode!

Hope this helps!