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Strings

Printing

Retrieve a string containing ampersands from the variables in a url

My PHP script first does a query to obtain customer info for a form. The form has first name and last name fields among others. The customer has put entries such as "Ron & Jean" in the first name field in the database. Then the edit form script is called with variables such as

"http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=Ron & Jean&lname=Smith".

The script variable for first name $_REQUEST['firstname'] never gets beyond the "Ron" value because of the ampersand in the data.

I have tried various functions like urldecode but all to no avail. I even tried encoding the url before the view screen is painted so that the url looks like "http://myserver/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname="Ronxxnbsp;xxamp;xxnbsp;Jean"&lname=SMITH". (sorry I had to add the xx to replace the ampersand or it didn't display meaningful url contents the browser sees.)

Of course this fails for the same reasons. What is a better approach?

python

# I'm not really sure this is what the site is for,
# but the one unsolved problem for python was grating me.
# Anyway, I think this is what you're looking for.

from urllib import urlencode

query_dict = {'mode': 'view',
'fname': 'Ron & Jean',
'lname': 'Smith'}

print urlencode(query_dict.items())

# Which will be 'lname=Smith&mode=view&fname=Ron+%26+Jean'.

clojure

(->> {"mode" "view"
"fname" "Ron & Jean"
"lname" "Smith"}
(map #(str (URLEncoder/encode (first %) "UTF-8")
"="
(URLEncoder/encode (second %) "UTF-8")))
(reduce (fn [url e] (str url "&" e))
"http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php"))

fsharp

//the problem arises due to the fact that you've attempted to apply HTML entities encoding rather than URL encoding to your data!
//in F#, for example, assuming you would call this function with fname and lname parameters, this would produce the desired output
let getProperUrl fname lname = sprintf "http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=%s&lname=%s" (HttpUtility.UrlEncode fname) (HttpUtility.UrlEncode lname)

fsharp

// Example that shows encoding and decoding:
let queryString =
let fname = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Ron & James")
let lname = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Smith & Jones")
sprintf "http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=%s&lname=%s" fname lname
/// All parameters in the URL as a lookup map
let parameters =
let paramStart = queryString.IndexOf('?')
if paramStart < 0 then
Map.empty
else
let values =
queryString.Substring(paramStart + 1)
|> HttpUtility.ParseQueryString
values.AllKeys
|> Seq.map (fun key -> key, values.[key])
|> Map.ofSeq
let fname = parameters.TryFind("fname")
let lname = parameters.TryFind("lname")

erlang

% encode ampersand in your string using %XX where XX is hex code for ampersand
% optionally encode spaces for completeness sake to keep URL solid
URL = "http://myserver.com/custinfo/edit.php?mode=view&fname=Ron%20%26%20Jean&lname=Smith",
{_, Query} = string:tokens(URL, "?"),
KeyValuePairs = string:tokens(Query, "&"),...

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