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I have a very specific situation where a javascript page creates a new window with a meta-refresh in it which goes to a php page which has 1 variable with everything that the javascript page has put in it. Like so:

form.write('<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=contentreq/index.php?data=');
Very long text with a lot of data (over 3000 characters)
form.write('" />');

The php page gets it like this:

$data=$_GET['data'];
$order=htmlentities(stripslashes(strip_tags($order)));

The problem is an existing app has this problem and I'm not in the situation to solve it properly so I was wondering if there is some way to encrypt/encode the data variable so that it will be a lot shorter. (My apache server does not like an 82512 characters long url...) Like tinyurl does, but PHP must be able to decode it back. I don't know the right term for it so my googling does not give me a lot of results.

user000001
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3 Answers3

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The right term for this would be compression, but it won't work in this case either - the general URL length limit is 2000 characters because IE sets it that low, and if your data is tough to compress, you won't fit 3kb reliably into 2kb.

The only idea that comes to mind, if you can't store the data in a PHP session, is to "send the data ahead" using a Ajax POST request. That can carry much more than 3 kb. When the request has been sent, redirect to the next page, and have PHP fetch the transmitted data from the session or something.

It's not pretty, but the only idea that comes to my mind for this very specific scenario.

Another idea, although this is purely client-side so you can't pass on the URL, is storing the data in the browser-side local storage.

Reference:

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Pekka
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A URL shortening service saves hash-URL pairs and does redirects from the short URL to the long ones. This is not applicable to your case because your data URL part is dynamic.

An approach you can take is to put all your data in a cookie and let the PHP script read it from that cookie. Another option would be to POST you request to the PHP script, but this one may not be applicable.

Also note that there are differences between encryption, encoding and compression. You weren't asking for encryption or encoding, but compression.

Regards, Alin

Alin Purcaru
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Compression was the term I was looking for. I've rebuilt the javascript function to do a post with the link Pekka sent. The thing now works with the bizzare long queries.

Thanks!

This is the code I've used:

document.body.innerHTML += '<form id="dynForm" action="http://example.com/" method="post"><input type="hidden" name="q" value="a"></form>';
document.getElementById("dynForm").submit();

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