Question

I have URLs in this format :

http://site.com/index.php?title=%5BSOME_UNICODE_TITLE%5D&id=%5BID%5D&type=%5BTYPE%5D

When I try to use htmlspecialchars on this URL to encode unicode title the function encodes & too; so it will be &amp so variable name id is converted to ampid !
So I can’t read it from code.

How can I use htmlspecialchars on a URL without converting URL specific chars (e.g. &,=,…)?

Answer 1

IMHO you should just use urlencode() for URLs, because that’s what it is made for. If you cannot / do not want to use it and you always get a full URI. You could parse if before encoding it:

$uriParts = parse_url($fullUri);
$queryParts = array();
parse_str($uriParts['query'], $queryParts);

foreach($queryParts as $name => $value) {
    $queryParts[$name] = htmlspecialchars($value);

    // don't know whether you want to encode the key too
}

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

Example: http://codepad.viper-7.com/lIFiHB