Question

My automated call to the Twitter API causes problems when my update string has a & in it.

How do I properly encode my update string $update that contains a & before I use CURL to call the Twitter API?

// Set username and password for twitter API
        $username = '***';
        $password = '***';

        // The twitter API address
        $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml';

        // Alternative JSON version
        // $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';

        // Set up and execute the curl process
        $curl_handle = curl_init();

        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$update");
        curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");

        $buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);

        curl_close($curl_handle);

        // check for success or failure

        if (empty($buffer)) 
        {
            echo 'error?!';
        } 

Answer 1

You have two choices, urlencode() or http_build_query()

// Using urlencode()
$update = 'this & that';
echo "status=" . urlencode( $update );

// Using http_build_query()
$postFields = array(
  'status' => $update
);
echo http_build_query( $postFields );