Trouble with percent sign as %20 in URL

Might be able to fix with regex hack or mod_rewrite

[member123]

I'm currently trying to add some functionality to Feed on Feeds, an RSS reader that uses PHP/MySQL. The reader includes an autotagger that tags posts as they come in for some predefined tags that you input. However, if I use a multi-word tag that includes a space, things get all screwed up because the server encodes the space as %20.

Right now, when you filter by a tag, it goes to this URL:
http://example.com/b/?what=Youtube and it displays all posts with a YouTube tag.
If you filter by a multiword tag, it goes to something like this:
http://example.com/b/?what=Steve%20Jobs and tries to display all the tags with a Steve%20Jobs tag. None show up, because in the database they are tagged as Steve Jobs.

I came up with this code to try to replace the %20 with a space, but so far it hasn't worked:

if(!isset($_GET['what']))
{
$what = "unread";
} elseif(preg_match("/%[20]/", $what))
{
$what = preg_replace("/%[20]/"," ",$name2);
}
else
{
$what = $_GET['what'];
}

Does anybody see what I'm doing wrong, or have any other ideas about what do to about this? I think there might be a way to fix it using mod_rewrite, but I've never worked with that before so I'm not sure where to start.

I'm sure this is a pretty common problem, so hopefully you guys can help me. Thanks.

[edited by: coopster at 6:50 pm (utc) on May 9, 2008]
[edit reason] used example.com for domain [/edit]

[coopster]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, member123.

Why not just use the PHP function to urldecode [php.net] it?

[PHP_Chimp]

"/%[20]/" means a character class of either a 2 or a 0, so this doesnt match your %20. You could use /%20/ to match that.

However how about urldecode [php.net]? As this should change your encoded space into the real thing to allow you to show the correct page from your database.

<edit>
Beaten to it ;)

[edited by: PHP_Chimp at 6:57 pm (utc) on May 9, 2008]

[member123]

@coopster: That was one of the things that I tried. It didn't work, but I might have been doing it in the wrong place.

When I did it, it looked like this:
if(!isset($_GET['what']))
{
$what = "unread";
}
else
{
$what = urldecode($_GET['what']);
}

Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

[member123]

Update:

I tried changing the code to this, just to see if the problem was something else:

if(!isset($_GET['what']))
{
$what = "unread";
}
else
{
$what = "Steve Jobs";
}

Even that code doesn't load the tags for "Steve Jobs". I checked the database, and the tag appears in the database as "Steve Jobs" without the quotes.

Does anybody know at what point the space is being replaced, so that I can do something about it there?

Thanks.

[coopster]

At what point the space is being replaced? Are you building links? If you are pulling the value from the database table as "Steve Jobs" and are trying to make a link out of it, try using urlencode [php.net].

[member123]

Hey Coopster, yes I'm making links out of them. I'll try that out too.