PHP Function UrlEncode - Encoding URLs in PHP

If you’re working with URLs in PHP, you should know that you need to encode them before sending them over the Internet. This is because certain characters in a URL have special meanings and can cause errors if not encoded properly. The php function urlencode converts these characters into an arrangement that can be transmitted over the Internet.

In this article, we’ll learn how to use the php function urlencode and its counterpart, urldecode, to encode and decode strings for URLs in PHP. We’ll also look at why we need to encode URLs in the first place and how encoding can help us prevent common mistakes that can be made when using URLs.

You can use php function urlencode to encode any string that contains special characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet. The urlencode function replaces all non-alphanumeric characters with a combo of percent sign and two hex digits, and it replaces spaces with +. The htmlspecialchars() function can also be used to encode strings in PHP, but it differs from urlencode in that it preserves the original character, while urlencode replaces it with an empty space.

Another difference between htmlspecialchars and urlencode is that the latter uses an older encoding scheme. You can use the htmlspecialchars() function to change the default arg_separator of PHP to a semi-colon, but it’s best to stick with urlencode for most situations.