Reserved Characters in URLs – PHP

These are list of following of reserved characters for links:

! # $ % & ( ) * + , / : ; = ? @ [ ]

These characters need to be encoded so it doesn’t interfere with the function of the URL.

These characters will turn into %21 hexadecimal characters.

A fix for this is

<?php
 urlencode($string);

?>

URLencode

• Letters, numbers, underscores, and dash are unchanged
• Reserved characters become % + 2 digit hexadecimal
• Spaces become “+”
• Use this for query string after that ?

rawurlencode

• rawurlencode should only be used for file path
• path is the part before “?”
• spaces must be %20
• it’s newer