I am passing a URL through a GET variable. When I echo the variable on the next page, it displays the URL without special characters. For example, take the URL:
http://example.com/upload?url=http://www.test.com/this%20is%20the%20image.jpg
When this code executes:
echo $_GET['url'];
the result is:
http://www.test.com/this is the image.jpg
How do I get exactly what the value of the GET variable is in the URL, and not have it converted upon retrieval?
You will need to parse $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] yourself if you want the raw values in the query string.
Do this:
echo rawurlencode($_GET['url']);
http://example.com/upload?url=http://test.com/somepath?somevar=someval&somevar2=someval2?
urlencode for this. My solution is wrong here.Consider urlencoding the url when constructing the upload?url=... path instead, which will add you more flexibility with urls like http://www.test.com/this%20is%20the%20image.jpg?with=some&additional=parameters.
So that for your example url it will be http://example.com/upload?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.com%2Fthis%2020is%2020the%2020image.jpg.
See http://php.net/urlencode for how to urlencode the variable.
Example:
Page with link
function showLink($url) {
return "/upload?url=".urlencode($url);
}
"Upload" page
echo $_GET['url']
That way, you'll still be able to process the link resulted from showLink("http://test.com/somepath?somevar=someval&somevar2=someval2") properly. Otherwise, if you won't escape it in showLink, you'll end up with the url like http://example.com/upload?url=http://test.com/somepath?somevar=someval&somevar2=someval2, and it will be quite difficult to tell whether somevar2 is the part of the request to the example.com or to the test.com (btw, $_GET['url'] will contain http://test.com/somepath?somevar=someval in such a case).
$_GET variable will contain exactly the urls you want, without the need to someway parsing it from the request-string. BTW you shouldn't create the request string manually in the first place (compiling it from the array instead), but unfortunately PHP doesn't provide built-in tools for doing this unfortunately.<form action="http://example.com/upload" method="GET"><input type="hidden" name="url" value="http://test.com/somepath?somevar=someval&somevar2=someval2"></form>. This is just the way of storing variables in a GET request. You're instead storing the variables in some other non-standart, incomplete and incompatible way, and then wanting to get your original values after the parsing in a standart way has been done. Instead of using the standart encoding, you're inventing your own and then overcoming its drawbacks.