How do exposed views filters make their queries URL safe?

Question

I'm creating my own search form in D7, and I need to sanitize the search text so that it is URL safe. I need to mimic the way that the views module does it because I'm using the search_api module and views.

In short, I need to make this:

"what is going on around here, anyway?"

look like this:

what+is+going+on+around+here%2C+anyway%3F

How do I do that?

Answer 1

Use the url() function to encode your URLs.

url("what is going on around here, anyway?");

this will return the string '/what%20is%20going%20on%20around%20here%2C%20anyway%3F'

You could also use this to get the full, absolute URL.

url("what is going on around here, anyway?", array('absolute' => TRUE));

You may also be interested in the l() function if you need html output.

Answer 2

For future reference, here is what I did:

function my_search_form_submit($form, &$form_state) {

  if ($form_state['values']['area'] == 'cookbook') {
    $search_string = 'http://example.com/cookbook?recipe-search=';
  }
  elseif ($form_state['values']['area'] == 'blog') {
    $search_string = 'http://example.com/blog?blog-search=';
  }

  $search_string = url($search_string . urlencode($form_state['values']['search_value']));

  $form_state['redirect'] = $search_string;
}