Passing a URL as a GET parameter in Javascript

Question

I am trying to make a bookmarklet that uses the user's current URL, kind of like the tinyURL bookmarklet that uses this javascript code

javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url='+location.href)

So I copied that same thing and made

javascript:void(location.href='http://mywebsite.com/create.php?url='+location.href)

Then I use:

$url=$_GET['url']; 

to retrieve it. The problem is, if I am on a url that already has some get style info in the url, it messes everything up.

Example, If I am on:

http://www.google.ca/webhp?um=1&hl=en&safe=off

The '_GET' code sets $url to be

http://www.google.ca/webhp?um=1

So I think the info in google URL is messing up all of my URL parsing, I imagine I am doing something very incorrectly or someone has a very elegant solution for this. What should I do? please help

Answer 1

URL has a specified format. That part after ?, or to be more exactly between ? and # if exists, is called query string. It contains a list of key-value pairs - a variable name, = character and the value. Variables are separated by &:

key1=value1&key2=value2&key3=value3&key4=value4

You should escape location.href as it can contains some special characters like ?, & or #.

To escape string in JavaScript use encodeURIComponent() function like so:

location.href = "http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url=" + encodeURIComponent(location.href)

It will replace characters like & into %26. That sequence of characters isn't treated as a variable separator so it will be attached as a variable's value.