Passing URIs as URL arguments in Drupal 6

Question

I'm running into problems trying to pass absolute URIs as parameters with clean URLs enabled.

I've got hook_menu() set up like this:

function mymodule_menu() {
  return array(
    'page/%' => array(
      'title' => 'DBpedia Display Test',
      'page callback' => 'mymodule_dbpedia_display',
      'page arguments' => array(1),
    ),
  );
}

and in the page callback:

function mymodule_dbpedia_display($uri) {
  // Make an HTTP request for this URI
  // and then render some things
  return $output;
}

What I'm hoping to do is somehow pass full URIs (e.g. "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Coffee") to my page callback. I've tried a few things and nothing's worked so far...

1. http://mysite.com/page/http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FCoffee
   Completely breaks Drupal's rewriting
2. http://mysite.com/page/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FCoffee
   Gives a 404
3. http://mysite.com/page/http://dbpedia.org/resource/Coffee
   Returns just "http:", which makes sense

I could probably use $_GET to pull out the whole query string, but I guess I'm hoping for a more 'Drupal' solution. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If the source of the urls is something you control, why don't you use a reversible encoding, like base64, to encode the string and therefore remove any tricky characters, then decode when you execute your menu callback. Eg:

$link = 'http://www.example.com?uri='. base64_encode($uri);

...


function mymodule_dbpedia_display($uri) {

$uri = base64_decode($uri);
// Make an HTTP request for this URI
// and then render some things
return $output;
}

Answer 2

I have had this problem before, trying to do the same thing (RDF browsing). I got round it by using rawurlencode and rawurldecode on the URI.

So when creating link do

l('Click Here', 'page/' . rawurlencode($uri));

and when using your $uri variable do a rawurldecode();

$uri = rawurldecode($uri);

It will give you a URI something like

http://mysite.com/page/http%253A%252F%252Fdbpedia.org%252Fresource%252FCoffee

Answer 3

This should just work; it's a known bug in Drupal. You could try the patches in that thread, but your best bet may be to just do a different encoding on top of URL encoding, as others have suggested.

Answer 4

Instead of using page/%, use page/%menu_trail. %menu_trail will pass the rest of the URL as a single string that in your example will be passed to the menu callback as $uri.