Server automatically stripping "+" sign from my url

xeelee

Hi guys

my web host just did some kind of upgrade..

now when i Get a variable the "+" plus sign is automatically strip out..

page1

http://www.domain.com/page2.php?q=xxxx+yyyy

when i pass the variable to page 2:

page2

echo $_GET['q'];

when i echo q..
it would display xxxx yyyyy

without the "+" plus sign..

by right when i echo q it should display "xxxx+yyyy"

any idea how to prevent it from stripping out the plus sign ?

as i am passing an encrypted string from one page to another page..
by stripping out the "+" sign.. the encoded string is corrupted and i can't decrypt it anymore..

TIA xeelee 🙂

bpat1434

I take it you're using [man]urlencode[/man] to encode the string?

I guess you might try a simple [man]str_replace/man to see if that will work, but it most likely will not (but it could). Not really sure why the server would strip it out...maybe his PHP settings use it somewhere, like the variable separator or something.

What server & PHP version?

Weedpacket

That's because + has a particular meaning in URLs, which is why data should be urlencoded() in URLs. To save you time, I can point out that a urlencoded "+" would appear as "%2A", so you can just use that in the URL instead of "+".

bradgrafelman

In other words, the best solution is to use [man]urlencode/man on your data before passing it through the query string.

xeelee

thanks for all the replies guys..

currently using str_replace to replace all the " " with "+".. so far it works..but still think its not the right way to solve this..

ee.. nope not using urlencode() on the string..will try that..

as the string is an encrypted string using M_CRYPT .. so it is a random string with all kinds of funny characters..eg.."+","/"..

any idea if its some option of php or the apache server that is stripping out the "+" from the url ?

bradgrafelman

That's already been explained, as well as how to fix your problem.

Weedpacket wrote:
That's because + has a particular meaning in URLs, which is why data should be urlencoded() in URLs.