How can I include a URL with its own parameters in a query string?

Question

I'm trying to post a YouTube URL along with some other data. The YT URL has 2 parameters and looks something like this:

http://youtube.com/embed/ytid?wmode=transparent&showinfo=0

The full URL would be like this:

http://mysite/proc.php?param1=val1&param2=val2&param3=(the youtube url)

Without the second param (showinfo) it works correctly. But having an ampersand as part of of a parameter value splits the parameter itself, so my query string parameters end up looking like this:

param1: val1
param2: val2
param3: http://youtube.com/embed/ytid?wmode=transparent
showinfo: 0

How should I be handling this?

[EDIT] As helion3 pointed out, the query string needs to be html encoded and it is. The encoded value looks like this:

http://youtube.com/embed/ytid?wmode=transparent&amp;showinfo=0

And the query string parameter ends up like this:

param3: http://youtube.com/embed/ytid?wmode=transparent
amp;showinfo: 0

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 20:33:26Z

2

You'd need to encode the data for inclusion in a URL.

You tagged this as php, which has urlencode:

urlencode('the&info')

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 20:33

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answered Feb 4, 2014 at 22:55

helion3

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4 Comments

Duffy Dolan Over a year ago

The query is being encoded so the param value becomes &showinfo=0, but it still breaks as it's still using an ampersand. I'm going to edit my question to clarify this.

helion3 Over a year ago

That's not from urlencode... that's from htmlentities. Using urlencode would produce the%26info

André Catita Over a year ago

What helion3 said. urlencode doesn't transform code into html entitys, it uses the hex representative.

Duffy Dolan Over a year ago

That is it! Thank you, helion3! I knew I'd handled this before.

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