Re: Question about urlencode....

Unless your URL is more complicated than your example, you shouldn't need to use urlencode() at all. You'd need to use it in a case where your string may contain characters that aren't valid in URLs like spaces and such: $baseurl = "http://www.somesearchsite.com/search="; $searchfor = "Grace O'Mally"; $searchurl = $baseurl . urlencode($searchfor); Since you set your URL explicitly and it's not something entered by a user, you shouldn't need it. Try that and see if it fixes your other problem with double encoding.. or at least gives a better clue as to where it's coming from. Slainte! -TG ----- Original Message ----- From: Colin Guthrie <gmane@colin.guthr.ie> To: php-general@lists.php.net Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:19:18 +0000 Subject: [PHP] Question about urlencode.... > Hi, > > OK this one is a little embarrasing. I've been doing this for years and > I just wonder if I'm wrong.... > > Say you have an exit link on your site, e.g. /leave.php, which accepts a > "url" get arg. You use this page to record stats/whatever and then issue > a Location: header to take the user to the correct location. > > Fairly standard yeah? > > Well I've been doing something like: > > $url = 'http://colin.guthr.ie/'; > echo '<a > href="/leave.php?url='.urlencode($url).'">Click</a>'; > > The logic in /leave.php does not need to call urldecode as it's done > automatically by PHP. > > This has worked well for me in the browsers I've used (IE, FF etc.) > > Recently, though, when using google webmaster tools I noticed that I was > getting a lot of 404's and this ultimately stemmed from the double > urlencoding of these url paramaters whereby the % signs used to encode > characters like / as %2F were encoded themselves leading to %252F. PHP > would automatically urldecode this to %2F but that still leaves me with > an encoded variable. Ugg. > > So my question is, is the google bot just getting it wrong? Is it > reading the link and seeing a % and encoding it? Or is it finding a page > somewhere randomly on the interweb which has incorrectly double encoded > it and going from there? > > It doesn't give you an referrer info which makes tracking down such > errors pretty tricky.... :( > > I could just call urldecode manually, but I'm curious as to why I should > need to. Anyone fought with this before? > > Col