PHP - URL Encoding

[cheetahten]

Newbie here

 

I been playing with a php script that receives allot of paramaters

 

Things like , Size, Upload directory, File names, etc...

 

Anyways, I noticed that allot of the URL for dynamic pages in other sites look like gibberish, specially many image urls... Am assuming these are dynamic or something.

 

Anyways, My question...

 

Do people Encode URL? is this a common practice? for security?

[DEVILofDARKNESS]

You can do this, but you can also store some parameters in cookies or sessions, depending on how many in the same time their are needed, but url-encoding if ofcourse safer as plain-view.

[gevans]

I tend to use urlencode when I'm sending data from page to page using the GET request. THen I'll decode it one the receiving page so it is in the format I want it to be in.

 

As far as the gibberish question with reagrds to displaying images, if the image has been uploaded, and it's path/filename stored in a db, this can be a unique id for referencing the image, maybe the hash of a timestamp and the filename.

 

Consider the following;

 

<?php
$filename="myfile"; //file extension removed
$timestamp=1246274928; //put it in statically for your viewing pleasure
$hashed_filename=md5($timestamp.$filename);
echo $hashed_filename;//echos 'd5f9f505a1f710e2f146c32e42e6ad73'