rawurlencode and ampersand's problem

[Jeff80]

I'm trying to include a title in the url of a link that contains an ampersand. For example, the link would look like:

http://www.blah.com/blah

& blah/blah.html

I'm using rawurlencode on the "blah & blah" part to make the link safe, but when I click on the link, it tries to load the page:

http://www.blah.com/blah /blah.html

It is cutting off everything after the ampersand. What's the best way to translate the ampersand so that it works?

Thanks,
-Jeff

 

[DRJ478]

First of all, it is not a great idea to have a URL that uses an ampersand for any other functionality than the querystring. Spaces in URLs also are not the greatest idea.

I would run htmlentities() on the URL first, then the urlencode.

Anyway, please post your code so we can see the encoding and decoding.

 

[Jeff80]

I knew ampersands and spaces were not good in the url if left untranslated. I am creating a library of articles with the articles divided by category. Let's say one of the categories is called "Health & Fitness". I wanted to put it directly in the link for the articles to improve search engine ranking. For example, the link might look like:

http://www.blah.com/Health

& Fitness/article1.html

The "Health & Fitness" isn't an actual directory on the server. It's just being used with mod_rewrite so my dynamic links look static - again for SEO.

I knew the name "Health & Fitness" couldn't be put in directly. I was using:

<a href="

http://www.blah.com/<?=rawurlencode("Health

& Fitness")/article1.html">Article 1</a>

Using that function, I would always get "Health%20%26%20Fitness" in the url which I thought would work. However, when I click on it, it tries to load the link:

http://www.blah.com/Health /article1.html

As a temporary fix, I'm just using a custom function I wrote to replace commonly-used special characters like the ampersand (eg: & becomes "and").

 

[DRJ478]

The URL encoding will be done by the client. You need not worry anout that. You can replace the ampersand with the HTML entity. But I think urlencoding is not necessary.

Have you tried the straight URL?

N.B>
Most search engines do well nowadays with the URL containing querystrings.