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phpstringurlquotes

PHP string with singlequotes for url request

There is some site, whitch is using odata protocol for api access. To load users with specific status id, for example, I can use this url:

https://domain.com/contacts/?$filter=status_id eq 1

Plain and simple. In this case I'm just defining a string and getting expected response with curl:

$ch = curl_init();
$query = 'https://domain.com/contacts/?$filter=status_id eq 1'
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $query);
$response = curl_exec($ch);

But the real problem starts with this:

https://domain.com/contacts/?$filter=email eq '[email protected]'

Here email is surrounded with single quotes. I've tried both single and doublequotes string with escaping:

$query = 'https://domain.com/contacts/?$filter=email eq \'[email protected]\''
$query = "https://domain.com/contacts/?\$filter=email eq '[email protected]'"

None of this has worked -- I've been getting request error every time. But if I run this in ruby -- everything working as it expecteted:

RestClient.get "https://domain.com/contacts/?$filter=email eq '[email protected]'", []

What can I do here? The version of PHP is 5.3.

Solution 
  • https://domain.com/contacts/?$filter=email eq '[email protected]'

    This is not a valid URI. The valid URI encoded form would be:

    https://domain.com/contacts/?%24filter=email%20eq%20'email%40example.com'

    URLs have certain special characters which you cannot use directly, but which must be encoded to %.. sequences in order to be valid. You do this in PHP by using rawurlencode. You must encode the items separately:

    $url = 'https://domain.com/contacts/?' . rawurlencode('$filter') . '=' . rawurlencode("email eq '[email protected]'");

    Whether the receiving server will accept that URL or not is a different topic, but at least you're covering the basics on your end.