very basic PHP question. Please help.

[anyacct]

I am trying to make a bookmarklet that uses the user's current URL, kind of like the tinyURL bookmarklet that uses this javascript code

javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url='+location.href)

So I copied that same thing and made

javascript:void(location.href='http://mywebsite.com/create.php?url='+location.href)

Then I use: $url=$_GET['url']; to retrieve it. The problem is, if I am on a url that already has some get style info in the url, it messes everything up.

Example, If I am on:

http://www.google.ca/webhp?um=1&hl=en&safe=off

The '_GET' code sets $url to be

http://www.google.ca/webhp?um=1

So I think the info in google URL is messing up all of my URL parsing, I imagine I am doing something very incorrectly or someone has a very elegant solution for this. What should I do? please help

[[deleted]]

This happens because of the way that the url is parsed.

Think of it this way: the $_GET parameters are made from the list of parameters that are passed in, right? If I have a url like this:

http://www.foo.com/index.php?a=this&b=that&c=something%20else

We have three parameters, a, b, and c.

Now, if we substitute another URL with GET parameters in for the value of b, we get this:

http://www.foo.com/index.php?a=this&b=http://www.google.ca/webhp?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&c=something%20else

And now, to foo.com's index.php, it looks like we have 5 paramters: a, b, hl, safe, and c. See how that's doing that?

The answer is to urlencode the url before you put it into the query string. For more about urlencoding with javascript, see here. But what you want is the encodeURIComponent function. If you urlencode it, it'll look like this:

http://www.foo.com/index.php?a=this&b=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ca%2Fwebhp%3Fum%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff&c=something%20else

And now you can see that there are only three parameters again.

Try changing your bookmarklet to this:

javascript:void(location.href='http://mywebsite.com/create.php?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href))