Question

Say I request this URL:

http://mydomain.com/script.php?var=2+2

$_GET[‘var’] will now be: “2 2” where it should be “2+2”

Obviously I could encode the data before sending and then decode it, but I’m wondering if this is the only solution. I could also replace spaces with plus symbols, but I want to allow spaces as well. I simply want whatever characters were passed, without any url decoding or encoding going on. Thank you!

Answer 1

Of course. You could read out $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"], break it up yourself, and then forgo the usual URL decoding, or only convert %xx placeholders back.

preg_match_all('/(\w+)=([^&]+)/', $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"], $pairs);
$_GET = array_combine($pairs[1], $pairs[2]);

(Example only works for alphanumeric parameters, and doesn’t do the mentioned %xx decoding. Just breaks up the raw input.)