urldecode necessary?

[cyberRobot]

Before I was hired for my job, the website was managed by our Web host. They created several PHP forms for us and they always used the "urldecode" function when they retrieved variables. Is that necessary?

In the PHP book I'm reading, it says that the server does this for you automatically. Note: we've never used "urlencode". 😕

Thanks

[sid]

you can use it just to be safe - only with forms that use the GET method though. POST never should pose that problem... much more likely is the need for [man]stripslashes/man though.