Question

I have a url that gets encoded when serialized with jquery and comes out like this:

index.php?city%5B%5D=METROPLOIS&city%5B%5D=GOTHAM

Supposed to be index.php?city[]=METROPLOIS&city[]=GOTHAM

On the other end, I’m using joomla to pull down a bunch of variables out of the url

$city = JRequest::getVar('city');

Now, another user was nice enough to point me to this code in PHP which would get the city variables and then implode them into

$cities = $_GET['city'];

$str = "CITY='".implode("' OR CITY='",$city)."'";

Where $cities = $_GET['city']; is equivalent to $city = JRequest::getVar('city');

So, I’m running into a challenge that I don’t know how to address. How to decode the URL in Joomla so that it will recognize city%5B%5D as city[] or city.

I’ve seen this: http://php.net/manual/en/function.urldecode.php, but that pulls down the URL and puts it into a string. How would I then tell Joomla to pull variables form that string instead of the URL ?

Answer 1

Use urldecode to decode the url

$decoded = urldecode('index.php?city%5B%5D=METROPLOIS&city%5B%5D=GOTHAM');
$query = parse_url($decoded, PHP_URL_QUERY);
parse_str($query, $params);
$city = $params['city'];
echo "CITY='".implode("' OR CITY='",$city)."'"; 

DEMO

http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-str.php