Test if string is URL encoded in PHP

user_175407 0
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How can I test if a string is URL encoded?

Which of the following approaches is better?

  • Search the string for characters which would be encoded, which aren't, and if any exist then its not encoded, or
  • Use something like this which I've made:

function is_urlEncoded($string){
 $test_string = $string;
 while(urldecode($test_string) != $test_string){
  $test_string = urldecode($test_string);
 }
 return (urlencode($test_string) == $string)?True:False; 
}

$t = "Hello World > how are you?";
if(is_urlEncoded($sreq)){
 print "Was Encoded.\n";
}else{
 print "Not Encoded.\n";
 print "Should be ".urlencode($sreq)."\n";
}

The above code works, but not in instances where the string has been doubly encoded, as in these examples:

  • $t = "Hello%2BWorld%2B%253E%2Bhow%2Bare%2Byou%253F";
  • $t = "Hello+World%2B%253E%2Bhow%2Bare%2Byou%253F";
url-encoding testing php
13 Answers

In my case I wanted to check if a complete URL is encoded, so I already knew that the URL must contain the string https://, and what I did was to check if the string had the encoded version of https:// in it (https%3A%2F%2F) and if it didn't, then I knew it was not encoded:

//make sure $completeUrl is encoded
if (strpos($completeUrl, urlencode('https://')) === false) {
    // not encoded, need to encode it
    $completeUrl = urlencode($completeUrl);
}

in theory this solution can be used with any string that has characters that gets encoded, as long as you know part of the string (https:// in this example) will always exists in what you are trying to check.

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