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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T19:54:32+00:00

I have a query in a php string which i am trying to filter

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I have a query in a php string which i am trying to filter against % signs.
The whole thing is in utf-8.
If the string contains % (for example %acheron) it gets converted to its equivalent entity (in the case I mention it becomes the ‘not’ sign character which is interpreted by the %ac sequence in the string).
I cant seem to be able to clean the incoming string of this character/
I cant clean the string with a php replace because by the time its in the script it is already “decoded?”.

The only way I found that I could figure out was to use rawurlencode and then clean it but it seems like a crappy solution and one that creates problems with other characters for me.

Is there some more efficient way to clearing these characters without affecting the rest of the string ? for instance I am looking for a function that would strip % & # (and any other) from the string, but leave it intact otherwise. (preg_replace is not working for me)

In other words is there a way to accept the string and clean it without any potentially special characters getting converted so that I can strip them from the string.

EDIT: The query is coming in via GET, wasn’t clear on that.
EDIT2: With urlecode or rawurl encode :
%acheron is converted to %ACheron (which could be cleaned I guess) but
^acheron is converted to %5Eacheron (thus making it almost impossible to clean it via a pattern)…

Please excuse the noobishness of my question
Thanks
Larry

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    $string = preg_replace(“/(%|&|#)/”, ”, $string);

    Something like this? This should work, if I understood your problem.

    EDIT: Ok this is what you’re looking for:

    <?php
function myUrlEncode($string) {
    $entities = array('%21', '%2A', '%27', '%28', '%29', '%3B', '%3A', '%40', '%26', '%3D', '%2B', '%24', '%2C', '%2F', '%3F', '%25', '%23', '%5B', '%5D', '%5E');
    $replacements = array('!', '*', "'", "(", ")", ";", ":", "@", "&", "=", "+", "$", ",", "/", "?", "%", "#", "[", "]", "^");
    return str_replace($entities, $replacements, urlencode($string));
}


$search = myUrlEncode($_GET['id']);
$search = preg_replace("/(%|&|#)/", '', $search);

echo $search;
?>
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