Using PHP Replace SPACES in URLS with

Question

I\'m looking to replace all instances of spaces in urls with %20. How would I do that with regex?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You've got several options how to do this, either:

• urlencode() or rawurlencode() - functions designed to encode URLs for http protocol
• str_replace() - "heavy machinery" string replace
• strtr() - would have better performance than str_replace() when replacing multiple characters
• preg_replace() use regular expressions (perl compatible)

strtr()

Assuming that you want to replace "\t" and " " with "%20":

$replace_pairs = array(
  "\t" => '%20',
  " " => '%20',
);
return strtr( $text, $replace_pairs)

preg_replace()

You've got few options here, either replacing just space ~ ~, again replacing space and tab ~[ \t]~ or all kinds of spaces ~\s~:

return preg_replace( '~\s~', '%20', $text);

Or when you need to replace string like this "\t \t \t \t" with just one %20:

return preg_replace( '~\s+~', '%20', $text);

_{I assumed that you really want to use manual string replacement and handle more types of whitespaces such as non breakable space ( )}