Question

I have a bash script that has as a variable a urlencoded string, that I want to be decoded. I know this can be done with bash, but I thought I might as well just call a the PHP function urldecode() and be done with it.

I would have preferred to run the php function in the bash code, but I opted to write a very simple script

<?php
   echo urldecode($argv);
?>

and call this script in the bash script

#!/bin/bash
...#$MYURL is an encoded url
...
$MYURL="php myurldecodescript.php -- $MYURL"

Unfortunately this doesn’t work.
How is it best to do this?

Answer 1

You can do this, using PHP, without having to create the myurldecodescript.php file. If you supply a -r option to PHP, it will run code that you specify in the command line. So you can do this:

MYURL=`php -r "echo urldecode('$MYURL');"`