I discussed a little about URL encoding in my recent post Facebook: Bug with URL encoding, although it seems like the bug still exists. In this post I will discuss “how to encode a given URL before accessing it using CURL or fsockopen”. The problem with URLs is that they might contain certain disallowed characters like spaces, according to RFC 3986. Our aim is to convert these invalid characters to their percentage encoded values in a given URL , so that we can access the URL using our regular HTTP request methods.
