I'm building a very AJAX site which means posting a lot of information to the server, sometimes typed by a user.
this is how I'm posting things
xmlhttp.open("POST", 'somepage.php' ,true);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xmlhttp.send('post=stuuf I want to send');
An example of my problem is this, someone types FOO BAR as their name which would post firstName=FOO&lastName=BAR
which in php gets you $_POST['firstName'] is FOO and $_POST['lastName'] is BAR
but if someone types the name FOO&BAR SMITH it would post like this firstName=FOO&BAR&lastName=SMITH
which in php gets you $_POST['firstName'] is FOO and $_POST['BAR'] which has no value and this start to fall apart. It means I have to replace & in everything that is posted and I'm finding it annoying.
Is there a way to tell php to ignore any &, and just send one big string. when I need to send multiple values I was planning to break them up with an '_' I could then replace any user typed _ with _ and never have to worry about it again.
Could this be done in .htaccess or if not then in the php file itself?
Thanks for any help
Don't do this on the PHP end... send a proper HTTP request! You are mangling all of your data client-side. If you're sending URL encoded data, send it URL encoded.
No, but you absolutely must escape your data before using it as a string inside the ajax request.
You should encode the data you want to sent using encodeURI or encodeURIComponent. That way you can send whatever characters you want.