CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpurlcurl
pat
pat

Reputation: 1119

Angled brackets being escaped from url in PHP

I am trying to call the USPS API that takes in the zip code and returns XML containing the City Name of the given zip code.

Here is the URL they require:

http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPITest.dll?API=CityStateLookup 
&XML=<CityStateLookupRequest USERID="xxxxxxx"><ZipCode ID= "0"> 
<Zip5>90210</Zip5></ZipCode></CityStateLookupRequest>

In my PHP file, when I echo out the above URL, this is what I get:

http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPITest.dll?API=CityStateLookup&XML=90007

All the XML part of the URL is missing. I need to get curl data from the URL.

Anyone know what I could be missing?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 469

Answers (2)

M8R-1jmw5r
M8R-1jmw5r

Reputation: 4996

Anyone know what I could be missing?

Probably. Maybe, yes. What you describe in your posting sounds like an encoding problem. So you are missing the right encoding.

As you are talking about an URL that is likely URL encoding. Some characters - like space - have a special meaning inside an URL so you can not just use any character as you like, but you need to encode all characters properly.

The exact description how you need to formulate an URL incl. the exact description how URL encoding works is outlined in 2. Characters in the internet standard RFC3986.

PHP functions related to URL encoding are urlencode() and rawurlencode and more likely useful in your case http_build_query().

Upvotes: 1

Josh Austin
Josh Austin

Reputation: 776

http://php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php should get you started if you want to encode the xml into the URL.

Upvotes: 1

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