How to avoid that Drupal encodes my url

Question

I use hook_url_outbound_alter to change my url to /q=anything, but the url in browser is shown as /q%3Danything. How can I avoid that Drupal encodes the url?

Other choice would be to send q=anything as query, but then hook_url_outbound_alter includes the "?" character, and I can't include it.

if (preg_match('|^search/node/(.*)|', $path, $matches)) {
  $path = 'q=' . $matches[1];
}

Any idea? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

you shouldn't need to add the "q=" drupal will deal with that side of things, especially when you turn on clean urls.

Answer 2

If you want to add ?q=anything to the path you should add your query as an option to the $options array.

if (preg_match('|^search/node/(.*)|', $path, $matches)) {
  $options['query'] => array('q' => 'anything');
}

Answer 3

You cannot get a path like q=anything without encoding the equal sign; that is done to avoid problems with a path like q=anything?parameter=value. Your alternatives are just two:

• Get the question mark before the q doing as Pontus Nilsson said
• Avoid using q=anything, and use q/anything

The latter is what Drupal normally does. In fact, the path for a node is node/node-id, not node=node-id; the path for a user profile is user/user-id, not user=user-id.

Keep in mind that a clean path like node/1 is translated to index.php?q=node/1 in the .htaccess file. In your case, q=anything would be translated to index.php?q=q=anything. That is the reason why the second equal sign needs to be encoded.