How can I properly URL encode a string in PHP?

Question

I'm making a search page, where you type a search query and the form is submitted to search.php?query=your query. What PHP function is the best and that I should use for encoding/decoding the search query?

Answer 1

For the URI query value use urlencode/urldecode; for anything else use rawurlencode/rawurldecode.

To create entire query string use http_build_query()

The difference between urlencode and rawurlencode is that

• urlencode encodes according to application/x-www-form-urlencoded (space is encoded with +) while
• rawurlencode encodes according to the plain Percent-Encoding (space is encoded with %20).