PHP urlencode() Function

The PHP urlencode() function is used to encode the url. The function returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except -_. have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits and spaces encoded as plus (+) signs.

Syntax

urlencode(string)

Parameters

Return Value

Returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except -_. have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits and spaces encoded as plus (+) signs. It is encoded the same way that the posted data from a WWW form is encoded, that is the same way as in application/x-www-form-urlencoded media type. This differs from the RFC 3986 encoding (see rawurlencode() function) in that for historical reasons, spaces are encoded as plus (+) signs.

Example:

The example below shows the usage of urlencode() function.

<?php
echo urlencode("https://www.alphacodingskills.com")."\n";

$userinput = "an online learning portal";

echo '<a href="www.alphacodingskills.com/',
  urlencode($userinput), '">';
?>

The output of the above code will be:

https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alphacodingskills.com
<a href="www.alphacodingskills.com/an+online+learning+portal">

Example:

Consider one more example which shows how a string is encoded and decoded.

<?php
$str1 = "https://www.alphacodingskills.com";
$encoded_str1 = urlencode($str1);

echo "The string is: $str1 \n";
echo "Encoded string: $encoded_str1 \n";

$str2 = "https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alphacodingskills.com";
$decoded_str2 = urldecode($str2);

echo "\nThe string is: $str2 \n";
echo "Decoded string: $decoded_str2 \n";
?>

The output of the above code will be:

The string is: https://www.alphacodingskills.com 
Encoded string: https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alphacodingskills.com 

The string is: https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alphacodingskills.com 
Decoded string: https://www.alphacodingskills.com