Question

I have a URL that I’m passing through a jQuery ajax call (using encodeURIComponent) and decoding in PHP at the other end. I found what I thought to be a problem between rawurldecode() at the PHP end, but when using JUST PHP to rawurlencode() and rawurldecode() a test URL, I managed to get the same problem – can someone point out to me what I need to do here?

To reproduce:

$thing = rawurlencode("www.nzballet.org.nz?pa=thisthing&parmater1=23a&paramter2=another");
echo $thing;

This will produce:

http://www.nzballet.org.nz%3Fpa%3Dthisthing%26parmater1%3D23a%26paramter2%3Danother

If I then:

$rawurl = "www.nzballet.org.nz%3Fpa%3Dthisthing%26parmater1%3D23a%26paramter2%3Danother";
$decoded = rawurldecode($rawurl);
echo $decoded;

I get:

http://www.nzballet.org.nz?pa=thisthing&parmater1=23a¶mter2=another

This is the same output I got when passing between jQuery (ajax) and PHP, so it’s got nothing to do with that part of it. I have charset=UTF-8 specified in the HTML header – can someone enlightne me as to why I’m getting that weird character there?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It looks like your web browser is seeing &para and assuming you meant ¶, which is the entity for a paragraph symbol (¶). See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/100905/para-turns-into-within-pre for some more discussion on that issue.

To get around it, encode your entities with htmlspecialchars before displaying them:

$rawurl = "www.nzballet.org.nz%3Fpa%3Dthisthing%26parmater1%3D23a%26paramter2%3Danother";
$decoded = rawurldecode($rawurl);
echo htmlspecialchars($decoded);

From the manual:

Certain characters have special significance in HTML, and should be
represented by HTML entities if they are to preserve their meanings.

…

‘&’ (ampersand) becomes ‘&’