Ever had to pass a url parameter with special characters and then your application has trouble decoding it back? Or maybe you need to pass this parameter to a shell script, I've encountered this situation with the PHP Photo Gallery, sometimes some galleries would contain ampersands, single quotes or double quotes, so I created two simple functions to handle this in the gallery.
Test Link with Text containing special characters.
<?php
/**
* Encoding and decoding strings with special characters in the query string.
*
* @author Herbert Balagtas
*
*/
$str = '';
if ( isset($_GET['str']) ){
$str = $_GET['str'];
} else {
$str = "æ±‰å— ~ æ±‰å— Pancake's & Cookies Good Old fashioned waffles.";
}
/*if ( isset($_GET['str']) ){
$str = decode_string($_GET['str']);
} else {
$str = "æ±‰å— ~ æ±‰å— Pancake's & Cookies Good Old fashioned waffles.";
}
$url = encode_string($str);*/
echo '<a href="?str='.encode_string($str).'">Test Link with Text containing special characters.</a>';
if (isset($_GET['str'])){
echo '<br />';
echo '<br />';
echo 'Decoded String using the decode_string function: ';
echo '<br />';
echo decode_string($_GET['str']);
}
function encode_string($str){
$str = htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES);
$str = urlencode($str);
return $str;
}
function decode_string($str){
$str = html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES);
$str = stripslashes(urldecode($str));
return $str;
}
?>
<br />
<br />
<form action="" method="get">
Decoded String: <input type="text" name="str" value="<?php echo decode_string($str);?>" style="width: 500px;"/>
<br />
Encoded String: <input type="text" name="decoded" value="<?php echo encode_string($str);?>" style="width: 500px;"/>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>