How to pass a URL with multiple ampersands?

Example follows.

[HughMungus]

When I try to pass this to the redirect page:

redirect.php?id=1234&url=http://www.foo.com?id=1&source1=whatever&source1=whatever

The URL that is passed is:

[foo.com?id=1&source1=whatever...]

That is, I'm losing everything after the second ampersand. I know why. How do I prevent it? Trying to avoid doing a second DB call just to get the link that corresponds to the link ID.

TIA

[edited by: HughMungus at 9:15 pm (utc) on Nov. 13, 2004]

[g1smd]

To be valid HTML code, all of the & symbols should be encoded as & instead, even in URLs and links.

Try that first and see if anything improves.

[HughMungus]

Wouldn't "&amp" give me the same problem as I already have?

[dmorison]

url_encode() [uk.php.net] used only on the value of URL should do the trick, something like:

$target = "http://www.example.com/foo.html?a=123&b=456";
header("Location: /redirect.php?url=".url_encode($target));

[HughMungus]

Well, the problem is that the URL is not getting from one page to the other intact. It's reading the second ampersand in the URL as an "&" as in "?something=this&somethingelse=that".

[HughMungus]

Oops. Here's an update. I used urlencode on the FRONT end of things to make it work (that is, on the page with the link). It displays normally but passes the urlencoded value to the redirect page.

Thanks!

[mykel79]

You can try changing the = sign to some different symbol that definitely won't appear in the url. Then decode it (change it back to =) in redirect.php

[g1smd]

&something creates an entity error because there is no HTML entity called "something".

& does not create an entity error. The entity defined by & is an ampersand.

[HughMungus]

Right G1. I'm getting around it by just using urlencode on the links. Thanks again!

[g1smd]

You posted while I was still replying, so I didn't see the posts you made one and two minutes before mine.

[HughMungus]

Right. Thanks! (for answering) :D