   #PHP Manual URL Functions urldecode Variable Functions

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                                   urlencode

   (PHP 3, PHP 4 )
   urlencode -- URL-encodes string

Description

   string urlencode ( string str)

   Returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except -_.
   have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits
   and spaces encoded as plus (+) signs. It is encoded the same way that
   the posted data from a WWW form is encoded, that is the same way as in
   application/x-www-form-urlencoded media type. This differs from the
   RFC1738 encoding (see rawurlencode()) in that for historical reasons,
   spaces are encoded as plus (+) signs. This function is convenient when
   encoding a string to be used in a query part of an URL, as a
   convenient way to pass variables to the next page:

   Example 1. urlencode() example
   <?php
   echo '<a href="mycgi?foo=', urlencode($userinput), '">';
   ?>

   Note: Be careful about variables that may match HTML entities. Things
   like &amp, &copy and &pound are parsed by the browser and the actual
   entity is used instead of the desired variable name. This is an
   obvious hassle that the W3C has been telling people about for years.
   The reference is here:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2 PHP supports
   changing the argument separator to the W3C-suggested semi-colon
   through the arg_separator .ini directive. Unfortunately most user
   agents do not send form data in this semi-colon separated format. A
   more portable way around this is to use &amp; instead of & as the
   separator. You don't need to change PHP's arg_separator for this.
   Leave it as &, but simply encode your URLs using
   htmlentities(urlencode($data)).

   Example 2. urlencode() and htmlentities() example
   <?php
   echo '<a href="mycgi?foo=', htmlentities(urlencode($userinput)), '">';
   ?>

   See also urldecode(), htmlentities(), rawurldecode() and
   rawurlencode().
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