We're about to launch a little twitter Christmas competition, and I've run into a little snag.
To enter, people will need to post a tweet in the following format:
#user blah, blah, blah #hashtag
Currently, I have a form where they enter their answer (the blah, blah, blah) and a PHP script which encodes the entire statement and adds on the twitter url:
http://www.twitter.com/home?status=%40user%20blah%2Cblah%2Cblah%20%23hashtag
Then takes the user to twitter and puts the status in the update field.
However, whilst the spaces (%20) are decoded fine the # and # characters remain as %40 & %23 respectively, even when the tweet is posted. I cannot put the actual characters in the url as twitter mistakes this for a search.
Is there any way to solve this? I'd like to do it without requiring username & password etc if possible.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
I've had the same problem, and the solution was very simple.
Just use
http://twitter.com/home?status= instead of
http://www.twitter.com/home?status=
and it'll work as expected, even if the text isn't in ASCII.
If you want to know more details about this strange behavior see this blog post:
http://www.kilometer0.com/blog/2010/01/21/twitter-status-urls-and-ampersands/
Hope this helps someone.
Encode the spaces as + and it works:
http://twitter.com/home?status=%40user+blah%2Cblah%2Cblah+%23hashtag
You could try just posting right to Twitter:
<form action="http://www.twitter.com/home" method="GET">
<textarea name="status">
...
Hmm. At least when using the new Twitter layout ... this:
http://twitter.com/home?status=This+is+a+test+%26+So+is+this
... redirects to this (when logged in):
http://twitter.com/?status=This%20is%20a%20test%20&%20So%20is%20this
(notice the unencoded &) ... and the tweet-in-waiting becomes:
This is a test
:(
Myriad adjustments and variations didn't help. (Sigh.)
Admittedly sketchy workaround: Change & (%26) to + (%2B). It may be advisable do this with plain text, before (re-)introducing entities into the equation (e.g., don't change %26 to %2B). Measure twice, cut once, as they say.
After a wile i got this... You have to send as UTF8 encoded, you can use javascript to do that but I prefere PHP because my text also came from the tatabase....
SHARE ON TWITTER you can also put a twitter icon here...
I've done it using this function from MDN
To be more stringent in adhering to RFC 3986 (which reserves !, ', (, ), and *), even though these characters have no formalized URI delimiting uses, the following can be safely used:
function fixedEncodeURIComponent(str) {
return encodeURIComponent(str).replace(/[!'()*]/g, function (c) {
return '%' + c.charCodeAt(0).toString(16);
});
}
source
Related
Im using Twitter's RESTful API 1.1 and on odd occations usually when there is a URL embedded in the tweet it pulls through in funny charcters e.g.
#MyHandle_123 RT #ThinkAfricaFeed: Controversy & acrimony may surround Nigeria's country's federalist system but it may be the country's best option: htt…
I tried to call the function utf8_decode but its still renders funny characters in my browser.
Any idea's on how I can get the returned values to show correctly?
I was running into a similar problem, since you tried the utf8 decode and it didn't work, try this:
htmlentities($td->text, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');
where td is the object whose text or item is being referenced.
Hope that helps
I am sending an image and a tweet (text) to Twitter API as multipart/form-data. The image starts with '#someimagefile' and works as expected. The tweet text is something like, '#username hi.' but fails because cURL tries to interpret #username as a file path and errors out.
See answer from Wang Bin: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9137917/922522
While a work-around is to prefix the tweet text with a space so the # isn't the first char, I was wondering if there was a better way to do this? Twitter does not allow the # sign to be encoded as anything else, https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/6663.
Is there a way to make cURL for PHP ignore the # sign in the text (and not for the image)?
Have you tried encoding the "#" in the tweet?
str_replace('#', urlencode('#'), $tweet);
edit: I saw your the forum post you linked and I believe he's saying it needs to be percent encoded which is what urlencode does. Have you tried what I posted above? If not give it a shot.
Is there a way to replace the character & with and in a PHP web form as the user types it rather than after submitting the form?
When & is inserted into our database our search engine doesn't interpret the & correctly replacing it with & returning an incorrect search result (i.e. not the result that included &).
Here is the field we would like to run this on:
<input type="text" name="project_title" id="project_title" value="<?php echo $project_title; ?>" size="60" class="btn_input2"/>
Is there a way to replace the character & with and in a PHP web form as the user types it rather than after submitting the form?
PHP is on the server, it has no control over anything taking place under any circumstances what-so-ever on the client-side. It sends raw text from the web server, a 100megaton thermonuclear device explodes, and PHP never exists anymore after the content is sent. Just the document received on your client side remains. To work with effects on your client side, you need to work with JavaScript.
To do that, you would pick your favorite JavaScript library and add an event listener for "keyup" events. Replace ampersands with "and", and drop the replacement text back in the box. mugur has posted an answer that shows you how to do this.
This is a horrible solution in practice because your users will be screaming for bloody justice to deliver them from such an awful user experience. What you've ended up doing is replacing the input text with something they didn't want. Other search tools do this, why can't yours? You hit backspace, then what? When you hit in the text, you probably lose your cursor position.
Not only that, you're treating a symptom rather than the cause. Look at why you're doing this:
The reason is when & is inserted into our database our search engine flips out and replaces it with & which then returns an incorrect result (i.e. not the result that included &).
No, your database and search engine do no such thing as "flipping out". You're not aware of what's going on and try to treat symptoms rather than learn the cause and fix it. Your symptom cure will create MORE issues down the road. Don't do it.
& is an HTML Entity Code. Every "special" charecter has one. This means your database also encodes > as > as well as characters with accents in them (such as French, German, or Spanish texts). You get "Wrong" results for all of these.
You didn't show any code so you don't get any code. But here's what your problem is.
Your code is converting raw text into HTML Entity codes where appropriate, you're searching against a non-encoded string.
Option 1: Fix the cause
Encode your search text with HTML entities so that it matches for all these cases. Match accent charecters with their non-accented cousins so searching for "francais" might return "français".
Option 2: Fix one symptom
Do a string replace for ampersands either on the client or server side, your search breaks for all other encodings. Never find texts such as "Bob > Sally". Never find "français".
Before submitting the form you'd need to use JavaScript to change as the user types it in. Not ideal since JS can be turned off.
You'd be much better to "clean" the ampersands after submitting but before inserting into the database.
A simple str_replace should work:
str_replace(' & ',' and ', $_POST['value']);
But as others have pointed out, this isn't a good solution. The best solution would be to encode the ampersands as they go into the database (which seems to be happening just now), then modify your search script to allow for this.
You can do that as they complete the form with jquery like this:
$('#input').change(function() { // edited conforming Icognito suggestion
var some_val = $('#input').val().replace('&', 'and');
$('#input').val( some_val );
});
EDIT: working example (http://jsfiddle.net/4gXZW/13/)
JS:
$('.target').change(function() {
$('.target').val($('.target').val().replace('&', 'and'));
});
HTML:
<input class="target" type="text" value="Field 1" />
Otherwise you can do that in PHP before the insert sql.
$to_insert = str_replace("&", "and", $_POST['your_variable']);
I'm using more than one ampersand in my url, see my link below
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
When i try to validate in w3c validator it showed hundreds of error because of this & (ampersand).
After that i read some post in here and i got the solution too.
Instead of using (&) If i use (&) w3c validates fine.
But the problem now is in search Engine. Instead of taking (&). it is taking like the below link
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
if you copy paste the above link in the address bar it will take you to the wrong page!. Please help how can i solve it.
There must be an error in your code but since we cannot see any of it I think the most important bit is to understand why the W3C validator complaints about raw &.
The HTML syntax contains two basic elements: tags (e.g. <strong>) and entities (e.g. €). Everything else is displayed as-is.
Browsers are expected to ignore errors.
When you type unknown or invalid tags, the browser will do its best to guess and fix it (you are probably aware of that already):
<p>Hello <i>world</b>!</p>
... will render as:
<p>Hello <i>world</i>!</p>
But the same happens when you type an unknown or invalid entity. In your example, there are two invalid entities:
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
^^^^ ^^^^^
However, it works because the browser is clever enough to figure out the real URL. Only the validator complaints because it is a tool specifically designed to find errors.
Now, imagine I want to use HTML to write an HTML tutorial and I want to explain the <strong> tag. If I just type <strong>example</strong>, the browser will display example. I need to encode the < symbol so it no longer has a special meaning:
<strong>example</strong>
Now the browser displays <strong>example</strong>, which is precisely the content I want to show.
The same happens with your URL. Since & is part of the entity syntax, when I want to insert a literal & I need to encode it as well:
Barnes & Noble
... will render as Barnes & Noble. Please note that this is only a syntactic trick to insert plain text into a HTML document. Your document shows Barnes & Noble. to all effects, no matter how you encode it. So when you replace & with & in your URL, you are not changing your URL, you are just encoding it.
If search engines are spidering the wrong URL, that means you have actually changed your URL rather than just encoding it, so the source code is:
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
... and renders as:
http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many
This can happen, for instance, if you encode twice:
<?php
$url = 'http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many';
$url = htmlspecialchars($url);
$url = htmlspecialchars($url);
echo $url;
... or:
<?php
$url = 'http://www.theonlytutorials.com/video.php?cat=55&vid=3975&auth=many';
$url = htmlspecialchars($url); // Oops: URL is already encoded!
echo $url;
Seems that you made a typo error, it must be & not &amp;
I have made one form in which there is rich text editor. and i m trying to store the data to database.
now i have mainly two problem..
1) As soon as the string which contents "#"(basically when i try to change the color of the font) character, then it does not store characters after "#". and it also not store "#" character also.
2) although i had tried....in javascript
html.replace("\"","'");
but it does not replace the double quotes to single quotes.
We'll need to see some code. My feeling is you're missing some essential escaping step somewhere. In particular:
As soon as the string which contents "#"(basically when i try to change the color of the font) character
Implies to me that you might be sticking strings together into a URL like this:
var url= '/something.php?content='+html;
Naturally if the html contains a # symbol, you've got problems, because in:
http://www.example.com/something.php?content=<div style="color:#123456">
the # begins a fragment identifier called #123456">, like when you put #section on the end of a URL to go to the anchor called section in the HTML file. Fragment identifiers are purely client-side and are not sent to the server, which would see:
http://www.example.com/something.php?content=<div style="color:
However this is far from the only problem with the above. Space, < and = are simly invalid in URLs, and other characters like & will also mess up parameter parsing. To encode an arbitrary string into a query parameter you must use encodeURIComponent:
var url= '/something.php?content='+encodeURIComponent(html);
which will replace # with %35 and similarly for the other out-of-band characters.
However if this is indeed what you're doing, you should in any case you should not be storing anything to the database in response to a GET request, nor relying on a GET to pass potentially-large content. Use a POST request instead.
It seems that you are doing something very strange with your database code. Can you show the actual code you use for storing the string to database?
# - character is a common way to create a comment. That is everything starting from # to end of line is discarded. However if your code to store to database is correct, that should not matter.
Javascript is not the correct place to handle quote character conversions. The right place for that is on server side.
As you have requested....
I try to replay you... I try to mention exact what I had done...
1) on the client side on the html form page I had written like this..
html = html.trim(); // in html, the data of the rich text editor will come.
document.RTEDemo.action = "submit.php?method='"+ html.replace("\"","'") + "'";
\\ i had done replace bcz i think that was some problem with double quotes.
now on submit.php , my browser url is like this...
http://localhost/nc/submit.php?method='This is very simple recipe.<br><strong style='background-color: #111111; color: #80ff00; font-size: 20px;">To make Bread Buttor you will need</strong><br><br><blockquote><ol><li>bread</li><li>buttor</li></ol></li></blockquote><span style="background-color: #00ff80;">GOOD.</span><br><br><br><blockquote><br></blockquote><br>'
2) on submit.php ........I just write simply this
echo "METHOD : ".$_GET['method'] . "<br><br>";
$method = $_GET['method'];
now my answer of upper part is like this...
METHOD : 'This is very simple recipe.
now i want to store the full detail of URL....but its only storing...
This is very simple recipe.