URL-encoding in redirect?

[eluser]Christoffer[/eluser]
Hey,

I am building a search function and I need to create easy to read URLs for bookmarks etc. This is a Swedish application first which means we need to support some special characters (å, ä, ö) that are not supported in URLs.

Therefore I need to encode the variable before it's posted to the user. The PHP function rawurlencode() works when I print the variable with echo() but neither redirect() nor header("Location: x") uses the encoded value.

Why is this and how can I work around it?

Code:

<?php
  // THIS WORKS!: echo rawurlencode((string)$query);
  $keyword = rawurlencode((string)$query);

  // This won't
  redirect('/search/' . $keyword );
?>

Thank you!

[eluser]cindor[/eluser]
hi,

you can use 2-way encryption algorithms. by using CI's enrypt library you can first encrypt the encoded string and then in your search method first decrypt the string then decode that string.

[eluser]Christoffer[/eluser]
That might work, but the link wouldn't be easily readable which I prefer. The same function would be used for some hyperlinks that needs to be SEO-optimized.

[eluser]cindor[/eluser]
for SEO you can create a replace function which replaces unsupported chars with SEO-optimized ones. but this way you may not be able to query the database. if i were you i would send 2 parameters.

/search/seo-optimized-query-string/enrypted-query-string

and i would use the decrpyted and decoded third parameter for querying the database

[eluser]Christoffer[/eluser]
That was an interesting idea. I'll go with that

Thanks a bunch!