file_get_contents - special characters in URL

Question

I am trying to get images from a remote server using file_get_contents. A URL to an image may contain spaces and/or special characters like ý, á, í, etc and when it does the operation fails with a HTTP code 400 - Bad Request. If I try to encode the url (or segments of that URL), using urlencode or rawurlencode, I get a 404.

When the image URL does not contain spaces nor special chars it is downloaded without problems.

I have a hunch that this has got something to do with encoding but I just can't figure it out. Is there an encoding option I'm missing? Is there a header that must be set for the request?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2236668/file-get-contents-breaks-up-utf-8-characters — Aurimas Ličkus, May 01 '12 at 11:03
alickus: That's not actually a duplicate, the question you linked is about UTF-8 in the response content, not the URL. — Kaivosukeltaja, May 01 '12 at 11:10
Open up that image in your browser. See how browser encodes URL. Then see the output of `echo urlencode($url);` and find differences — galymzhan, May 03 '12 at 04:33
How about cleaning file names of special characters and then doing the same with the user input? — Jasper, Oct 15 '13 at 15:14

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 15 '13 at 15:09

3

The problem with file_get_contents is the UTF-8 encoding (didn't implemented yet in PHP) If you want download file with this function, you have to do something like that on your URL:

$url_utf8 = rawurlencode(utf8_encode($url));

And after:

$content = file_get_contents($url_utf8);

answered Oct 15 '13 at 15:09

Jacky Lormoz

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This can lead to unpredicted results unless the PHP file is saved as `ISO-8859-1`. – Álvaro González Oct 15 '13 at 15:26

file_get_contents - special characters in URL

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