Question

I am using the following code on my site to display a thumbnail produced by the TimThumb script:

<img src="timthumb.php?src=<?php echo $image_url[0]; ?>&h=100&w=150" />

It works fine except when the image URL contains ‘+’. I think it is seeing the ‘+’ as a space. Is there a simple way to replace the ‘+’ symbol with ‘%2B’? I’m not a coder sorry but I guess it would be something like ‘str_replace’?

Answer 1

As Ignacio said, you can use urlencode, however, it’s often easier to let http_build_query handle it for you:

<img src="timthumb.php?<?php echo htmlspecialchars(http_build_query(array(
    'src' => $image_url[0],
    'h' => 100,
    'w' => 150,
))); ?>">

In this situation, urlencode is a lot shorter and cleaner looking, however, I’ve found that http_build_query tends to generalize better (especially when the number of parameters is not fixed).