Convert Unicode URL to ASCII

Question

Convert Unicode URL to ASCII

I am writing a PHP application that takes a URL from the user and then processes it by making multiple calls to binaries using system()

*. However, to avoid many of the complications that come with this, I am trying to convert a URL that can contain Unicode characters to ASCII characters.

Let's say I have the following URL:

https://täst.de:8118/news/zh-cn/新闻动态/2015/

There are two parts to handle here: the hostname and the path.

For the hostname, I can just call idn_to_ascii()

.
However, I cannot just call urlencode()

along the path, as each of the characters that should remain unmodified will also be converted ( news/zh-cn/新闻动态/2015/ -> news%2Fzh-cn%2F%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB%E5%8A%A8%E6%80%81%2F2015%2F

as opposed to news/zh-cn/%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB%E5%8A%A8%E6%80%81/2015/

).

How should I approach this problem?

^{* I'd rather not handle the calls system()

and the resulting complexity, but given that the functionality is only available when calling binaries, I unfortunately have no choice.}

+3

php encoding unicode ascii

user2064000 June 14. 15 at 14:29

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3 answers

split the url by /

then urlencode()

this part then put it back together

$url = explode("/", $url);
$url[2] = idn_to_ascii($url[2]);
$url[5] = urlencode($url[5]);
$url = join("/", $url);

+1

Peter June 14. 15 at 14:40

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You can use PHP's iconv function :

inconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $url);

0

Maltronic June 14. 15 at 14:42

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user2064000 · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-16T14:51:01+0000

You can use the following for this transformation:

function convertpath ($path) {
  $path1 = '';
  $len = strlen ($path);
  for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
     if (preg_match ('/^[A-Za-z0-9\/?=+%_.~-]$/', $path[$i])) {
       $path1 .= $path[$i];
     }
     else {
       $path1 .= urlencode ($path[$i]);
     }
  }
  return $path1;
}

Convert Unicode URL to ASCII

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