How to properly URL encode a string in PHP

Question

I m making a search page  where you type a search query and the form is submitted to search php query your query  What PHP function is the best and that I should use for encoding decoding the search query

User · Answer

Based on what type of RFC standard encoding you want to perform or if you need to customize your encoding you might want to create your own class.

/**
 * UrlEncoder make it easy to encode your URL
 */
class UrlEncoder{
    public const STANDARD_RFC1738 = 1;
    public const STANDARD_RFC3986 = 2;
    public const STANDARD_CUSTOM_RFC3986_ISH = 3;
    // add more here

    static function encode($string, $rfc){
        switch ($rfc) {
            case self::STANDARD_RFC1738:
                return  urlencode($string);
                break;
            case self::STANDARD_RFC3986:
                return rawurlencode($string);
                break;
            case self::STANDARD_CUSTOM_RFC3986_ISH:
                // Add your custom encoding
                $entities = ['%21', '%2A', '%27', '%28', '%29', '%3B', '%3A', '%40', '%26', '%3D', '%2B', '%24', '%2C', '%2F', '%3F', '%25', '%23', '%5B', '%5D'];
                $replacements = ['!', '*', "'", "(", ")", ";", ":", "@", "&", "=", "+", "$", ",", "/", "?", "%", "#", "[", "]"];
                return str_replace($entities, $replacements, urlencode($string));
                break;
            default:
                throw new Exception("Invalid RFC encoder - See class const for reference");
                break;
        }
    }
}

Use example:

$dataString = "https://www.google.pl/search?q=PHP is **great**!&id=123&css=#kolo&[email protected])";

$dataStringUrlEncodedRFC1738 = UrlEncoder::encode($dataString, UrlEncoder::STANDARD_RFC1738);
$dataStringUrlEncodedRFC3986 = UrlEncoder::encode($dataString, UrlEncoder::STANDARD_RFC3986);
$dataStringUrlEncodedCutom = UrlEncoder::encode($dataString, UrlEncoder::STANDARD_CUSTOM_RFC3986_ISH);

Will output:

string(126) "https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.pl%2Fsearch%3Fq%3DPHP+is+%2A%2Agreat%2A%2A%21%26id%3D123%26css%3D%23kolo%26email%3Dme%40liszka.com%29"
string(130) "https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.pl%2Fsearch%3Fq%3DPHP%20is%20%2A%2Agreat%2A%2A%21%26id%3D123%26css%3D%23kolo%26email%3Dme%40liszka.com%29"
string(86)  "https://www.google.pl/search?q=PHP+is+**great**!&id=123&css=#kolo&[email protected])"

* Find out more about RFC standards: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc3986/ and urlencode vs rawurlencode?

User · Answer

For the URI query use urlencode urldecode  for anything else use rawurlencode rawurldecode   The difference between urlencode and rawurlencode is that   urlencode encodes according to application x-www-form-urlencoded  space is encoded with    while rawurlencode encodes according to the plain Percent-Encoding  space is encoded with  20

User · Answer

You can use URL Encoding Functions PHP has the  rawurlencode      function  ASP has the  Server URLEncode      function  In JavaScript you can use the  encodeURIComponent      function

User · Answer

The cunningly-named urlencode   and urldecode     However  you shouldn t need to use urldecode   on variables that appear in   POST and   GET

User · Answer

Here is my use case  which requires an exceptional amount of encoding  Maybe you think it contrived  but we run this on production  Coincidently  this covers every type of encoding  so I m posting as a tutorial   Use case description  Somebody just bought a prepaid gift card   token   on our website  Tokens have corresponding URLs to redeem them  This customer wants to email the URL to someone else  Our web page includes a mailto link that lets them do that   PHP code     The order system generates some opaque token  token    w a amp  e   2   azW       Here is a URL to redeem that token  redeemUrl    https   httpbin org get token     urlencode  token       Actual contents we want for the email  subject    I just bought this for you    body    Please enter your shipping details here       redeemUrl      A URI for the email as prescribed  mailToUri    mailto  subject     rawurlencode  subject      amp body     rawurlencode  body       Print an HTML element with that mailto link echo   lt a href      htmlspecialchars  mailToUri       gt Email your friend lt  a gt      Note  the above assumes you are outputting to a text html document  If your output media type is text json then simply use  retval  url      mailToUri  because output encoding is handled by json encode     Test case   Run the code on a PHP test site  is there a canonical one I should mention here   Click the link Send the email Get the email Click that link   You should see    args        token    w a amp  e    2   azW        And of course this is the JSON representation of  token above

[php] How to properly URL encode a string in PHP?

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