netscape and spaces

[bmyster]

I'm kinda new to php3 & 4..anywho ..ive created some pages for work that
display various database info.....works great in IE 4 & 5...but not so well
in Netscape 4.7...i have a page that displays all the info in all columns
and rows...with the first column being the "ID" i made the ID column a
link to another page called "update.php3" and using "method get" all the
data text from that ID row gets imported to a html form...where i can edit
the data and update in the datatbase. Like i said ..it works great in IE.
however in Netscape when i click the link in the "ID" column it imports the
text from the row..untill it gets to a space in the field....and
stops...leaving the rest of the data text out.....whn i look at the addres
bar in netscape...it looks like so

http://darthvader.cybertours.com/workorder.cybertours.com/update.php3?id=1&T
imeNow=0105070911&FirstName=MatthewRoy&HostName=Sandys&Request=Sandy T would
like a login for ADMINDOUN stillmanPASS aliveThank you&Completed=2001-05-06
08:00:00&CompletedBy=B&WorkDone=She wasnt added to Adminiduo...so i added
her.

im not sure if this is suppose to do this but it seems that the text gets
put in the location bar ...and that each field is seperated by an & and the
Column name and text are seperated by an = . if anyone has suggestions it
would be greatly appreciated...Ive read that "urlencode" OR "htmlentities"
may be the answer....but iam unsure of the syntax ....help ??

Brent

[Anon]

Brent,

I'm not sure how much help I can be but if I'm a web developer and have dealt with headaches w/ Netscape and especially getting it to display tables correctly.

1.) There's a remote chance it could be your actual scripting - not variable passing. In Netscape you must define the exact pixel width of every table and cell or your asking for trouble. Do NOT leave any cells empty, even if you import one character that is the same color as the background of the cell.

2.)As for passing variables the reason it goes in the location bar is because your using <form method=GET action="yourphpscript.php"> By using POST none of the data will be in the location bar but I believe it is a little slower. However the location bar and variables works like this.
If your location bar looks like this:
www.whatever.com/script.php?name=Jake%20Smith&email=[e-mail]

This shows you what variables are passing. The URL above tells me that script.php was called and it passed only two variables. name and email, name = Jake Smith and email = [e-mail]

=================
Not sure if any of that will help,
but I guess it's worth a try.

Ben

[[deleted]]

Brent,
spaces are not allowed in URL's, hence urlencode. That will replace the spaces and other special chars with codes that the webserver does understand.

Syntax is described in the manual.

BTW this should fail just as badly on IE, but IE probably has a more lenient interpretation of the HTTP standard.

[bmyster]

hmm,,,could someone just give me the correct syntax or usage of "urlencode" and exaplme would be great if possible.

thanx
B

[[deleted]]

to quote the ever-ignored manual:

urlencode

(PHP3 , PHP4 )

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

echo '<A HREF="mycgi?foo=', urlencode ($userinput), '">';