Decoding text in PHP not decode - php

So. I have three massive texts from WYSIWYG editor that I need to store in DB (MySQL). To do that I use PHP function rawurlencode() put them in one array and serialize() the array, then insert into DB. But the problem is when I need to rawurldecode().
First I unserialize() then text decodes normally, but image tag decodes like this:
`<img alt="\"\"" src="\"/ckfinder/userfiles/images/facebook.PNG\""
style="\"float:right;" height:200px; width:198px\">`
there is multiple these ->\" that I dont need and in fact they don't appear in code that is not encoded. str_replace() won't help.
Maybe I do something wrong and there is better way how to store long texts in serialized array?

Use the stripcslashes() function available by default in PHP.
It will remove the backslashes that are added as escape characters.
Example

Related

PHP Escape a string if it hasn't already been escaped with entities

I'm using a 3rd party API that seems to return its data with the entity codes already in there. Such as The Lion’s Pride.
If I print the string as-is from the API it renders just fine in the browser (in the example above it would put in an apostrophe). However, I can't trust that the API will always use the entities in the future so I want to use something like htmlentities or htmlspecialchars myself before I print it. The problem with this is that it will encode the ampersand in the entity code again and the end result will be The Lion&#8217;s Pride in the HTML source which doesn't render anything user friendly.
How can I use htmlentities or htmlspecialchars only if it hasn't already been used on the string? Is there a built-in way to detect if entities are already present in the string?
No one seems to be answering your actual question, so I will
How can I use htmlentities or htmlspecialchars only if it hasn't already been used on the string? Is there a built-in way to detect if entities are already present in the string?
It's impossible. What if I'm making an educational post about HTML entities and I want to actually print this on the screen:
The Lion&#8217;s Pride
... it would need to be encoded as...
The Lion&amp&semi;&num;8217&semi;s Pride
But what if that was the actual string we wanted to print on the string ? ... and so on.
Bottom line is, you have to know what you've been given and work from there – which is where the advice from the other answers comes in – which is still just a workaround.
What if they give you double-encoded strings? What if they start wrapping the html-encoded strings in XML? And then wrap that in JSON? ... And then the JSON is converted to binary strings? the possibilities are endless.
It's not impossible for the API you depend on to suddenly switch the output type, but it's also a pretty big violation of the original contract with your users. To some extent, you have to put some trust in the API to do what it says it's going to do. Unit/Integration tests make up the rest of the trust.
And because you could never write a program that works for any possible change they could make, it's senseless to try to anticipate any change at all.
Decode the string, then re-encode the entities. (Using html_entity_decode())
$string = htmlspecialchars(html_entity_decode($string));
https://eval.in/662095
There is NO WAY to do what you ask for!
You must know what kind of data is the service giving back.
Anything else would be guessing.
Example:
what if the service is giving back & but is not escaping ?
you would guess it IS escaping so you would wrongly interpret as & while the correct value is &
I think the best solution, is first to decode all html entities/special chars from the original string, and then html encode the string again.
That way you will end up with a correctly encoded string, no matter if the original string was encoded or not.
You also have the option of using htmlspecialchars_decode();
$string = htmlspecialchars_decode($string);
It's already in htmlentities:
php > echo htmlentities('Hi&mom', ENT_HTML5, ini_get('default_charset'), false);
Hi&mom
php > echo htmlentities('Hi&mom', ENT_HTML5, ini_get('default_charset'), true);
Hi&amp&semi;mom
Just use the [optional]4th argument to NOT double-encode.

How to remove escaping in PHP?

I have this URL parameter:
KKe%7bZoE_%24g)tjm%40
When I put it into a variable and echo it, the result is:
KKe{ZoE_$g)tjm#
How to avoid that?
Data in $_GET is already URL-decoded. If you require the original string, get it from $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']. Note that you will have to process the query string yourself though, including breaking down the individual components.
Alternatively, use rawurlencode($_GET[..]) to re-encode the value; which may or may not produce slightly differently encoded values than you originally got.
Test it with html_entity_decode - it helpt me a lot with my inputs.
If the string is not shown as it is, you have urlencode() or htmlentities() somewhere in your code. Check that, you shouldn't encode html entities before echoing if you want the string to be intact.

Allow certain characters to pass through $_GET?

I wrote a script that when you enter a textbox, it will open an invisible iframe to a .php file with $_GET of what they wrote into the textbox.
However, for example, if I type: '<3' in it, this is what happens.
PHP determins that the $_GET[s] is blank! Users cant put a simple <3 symbol without getting that error.
Another problem is quotes, if I write any quotes, it will end the entire SRC property.
What should I do? Should I do something with javascript, or even PHP? Please let me know!
Thanks!
Use urlencode to encode the inputted string into a valid one for URL use.
Also be very cautious when allowing user input into your PHP script through the URL. Make sure you do proper checks/sanitization, especially if database operations are involved.
It looks like your iframe is generated by JavaScript, so all those answers that include PHP functions are useless. The data isn't even reaching PHP, so how can any PHP function hope to help?
Instead, try using urlencode from PHPJS, since none of JS's functions really handle all cases well, and this makes it easy for you to use PHP's urldecode to retrieve the data.
You need to encode that character as <.
Regarding double quotes, you can use this trick.
attr='Your string can "contain double quotes"'
or
attr="Your string can 'contain double quotes'"
but while specifying variable=values in url, you don't need to user double quotes, you can directly assign the values.
like
url="test.php?var1=123&var2=345"
rest about sending the <3 characters, you can check for url encoding in javascript & PHP whichever applicable!

How to escape html code to insert in mysql

I am using tinymce editor to have html page and then insert it in mysql.
I tried this:
$esdata = mysql_real_escape_string($data);
it is working for all html except images. If I have hyperlink like:
http://www.abc.com/pic.jpg
then it makes it somewhat very obscure and the image doesn't appear.
INPUT
<img src="../images/size-chart.jpg" alt="Beer" />
OUPUT
<img src="\""images/size-chart.jpg\\"\"" alt="\"Beer" />
Try to use urlencode and urldecode to escape the string.
As Christian said it is not used for the sake of DB but to keep the things as it is. So you can also use urlencode and urldecode.
For Ex:
//to encode
$output = urlencode($input);
//to decode
$input = urldecode($output);
You shouldn't over-escape code before you send it to DB.
When you escape it, it's done in a way that it is stored in the DB as it was originally. Escaping is not done for the sake of the DB, but for the sake of keeping the data as it was without allowing users to inject bad stuff in your sql statements (prior to sending the stuff in the DB).
You should use htmlspecialchars function to encode the string and htmlspecialchars_decode to display the string back to html

What's the trick to display a text from MySql/PHP back to its original HTML layout?

It still keeps the original text layout (I mean the spacing, offsets, new line, paragraphs) while the text fragment is stored in MySql ('text' type) field - I can tell when I peer into it in my DB browser (Adminer:)
but it gets lost when I output it from the DB: it becomes a single line string of my text characters. How can one restore it its original layout?
I've tried to reshape the text fragment using the PHP nl2br() function with some success:
it brought back the newline breaks, but the text words positioning is not kept, everything
shifts to the left.
Thanks in advance for a good idea.
If you've got multiple spaces and things like that. e.g. for code. Then trying using the pre tag.
http://htmldog.com/reference/htmltags/pre
http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/pre
The html_entity_decode() function converts HTML entities to characters.
The syntax is:
html_entity_decode(string, [quotestyle], [character-set]);
You can refer example2.

Categories