How to prevent PHP from renaming '×' to 'x' symbol?

Question

I have with an unwanted replaced, and not able to figure out how to fix it.

When you echo the following string in PHP

echo('?hash=123&rid=111&timestamp=123');

The output is:

?hash=123&rid=111×tamp=123

Note that &timestamp has been replaced with ×tamp

I tried to escape it by using \&timestamp but that doens't work.

How can I prevent PHP replacing this?

You can reproduce this error online using http://phptester.net/

`×` is the HTML equivalent. Quote the `&` as `&`. Conclusion: You need to [escape](https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities) URLs. — Markus Zeller, Jun 15 '20 at 14:37
@Markus Not "quote", but *encode*. And to avoid confusion, the URL needs to be *HTML-encoded*, not URL-encoded. — deceze, Jun 15 '20 at 14:39
For what it's worth, it looks like that testing website doesn't escape the _input_, so when it gets run, the input itself shows the times table. — Chris Forrence, Jun 15 '20 at 14:39

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 15 '20 at 14:37

2

You have to escape that string, because & is a special symbol in HTML.

echo htmlspecialchars('?hash=123&rid=111&timestamp=123');

answered Jun 15 '20 at 14:37

Iván Pérez

Ah, thanks. That was the issue, I did not even think about it being a HTML character. Thanks for helping out. – Red Jun 15 '20 at 14:48

1 Answers1