Question

This code:

$query = array(
    "var" => "no",
    "not_var" => "yes",
    "var2" => "maybe"
);
print http_build_query($query);

Outputs:

var=no¬_var=yes&var2=maybe

This happens on my own machine running PHP 5.3.19. I’ve reproduced this behavior on PHPfiddle. It works as expected on ideone.com running PHP 5.2.11.

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

This is only because of your browser encoding the &not entity, try this:

print htmlentities(http_build_query($query));

For normal usage, it will be absolutely fine.

The reason it’s different on ideone vs PHPFiddle is because PHPFiddle just dumps the results into an iframe, and ideone is displaying it pre-entity encoded so that other displays aren’t broken.