Question

I have a value in variable as follows…

$variable = "chicken soup.jpg";

when i do the following, spaces are converted to a + symbol in the output

$body = "www.abc.com/" . $variable
mail($to, $subject, $body,$headers)

Output in mail received: http://www.abc.com/chicken+soup.jpg

But i want the output as below ? Please help

Expected Output : http://www.abc.com/chicken%20soup.jpg or
http://www.abc.com/chicken soup.jpg

i tried using str_replace function but no luck

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure, if your email-client supports to view the plain source of that message, you’ll se that the url is "www.abc.com/chicken soup.jpg"; only your browser / email client encodes it, as it’s an invalid URL.

If you want to produce a valid url, encode it manually with:

$body = 'www.abc.com/' . urlencode( $variable );
// this will be 'www.abc.com/chicken+soup.jpg' as this is a valid url

or:

$body = 'www.abc.com/' . rawurlencode( $variable );
// this will be 'www.abc.com/chicken%20soup.jpg'

Edit:

You can read more about the difference:

• RFC 3986 encoding (rawurlencode())
• application/x-www-form-urlencoded (or form post) encoding (urlencode())