Question

I’m trying to replace a URL in CodeIgniter that has certain parameters. Not that CI should matter at this point as I have the best part of it working.

Lets say my URL is :

?device=field1-field2_field3+field4

By echoing out $devicelink2 that should show:

field1 field2.field3*field4

Currently it works with everything but replacing the +. For some reason it replaces + with a space.

However I can’t get that working using the below code. Any ideas?

    $device = $this->input->get('device');
    $devicelink = str_replace("-"," ",$device);
    $devicelink1 = str_replace("_",".",$devicelink);
    $devicelink2 = str_replace("+","*",$devicelink1);

Answer 1

+ in a query string actually represents a space character, so with this (very odd) query string:

?device=field1-field2_field3+field4

$this->input->get('device') is equal to field1-field2_field3 field4

To answer your literal question of how to get your desired output with this exact query string:

$device = $this->input->get('device');
$devicelink = str_replace(" ", "*", $device);
$devicelink1 = str_replace("_", ".", $devicelink);
$devicelink2 = str_replace("-", " ", $devicelink1);

Or:

$devicelink2 = str_replace(array(' ', '_', '-'), array('*', '.', ' '), $device);

If you are having trouble just getting these characters into the original query string, just make sure to encode it properly:

?device=field1+field2.field3%2Afield4

See PHP’s native urlencode function for help with this: http://php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php