Is there a simple way to escape/unescape an arbitrary character in PHP by doubling it, for example:
- in ANSI SQL,
"you can ""escape"" this way" - in printf(),
you can express a %% this way
Escaping is quite easy with str_replace(), but reversing the process to unescape the string is not that easy, so does anyone know of a pair of functions, or a library to do this?
The idea is that I need to serialize an array this way:
array('a','b', '~','c') => 'a~b~~~~c'
The individual strings cannot be empty.
Update: just realized that this “encoding” is broken, thanks to the useful comments below.
As several users pointed it out in the comments, this question is flawed and has no possible answer.
A detailed explanation of my goal, and an appropriate answer have been provided at Provide a human-readable representation of an identifier?