RE: base64-encoding in cookies?

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Exactly what I was going to mention, Brad.  Here's some more info.

Quoted from PHP manual for urlencode():

"Returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except -_. have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits and spaces encoded as plus (+) signs. It is encoded the same way that the posted data from a WWW form is encoded, that is the same way as in application/x-www-form-urlencoded media type. This differs from the RFC1738 encoding (see rawurlencode()) in that for historical reasons, spaces are encoded as plus (+) signs."

Try this:

$space = " ";

echo "Urlencoded: " . urlencode($space) . "<br>\n";
echo "Rawurlencoded: " . rawurlencode($space) . "<br>\n";

And you get:

Urlencoded: +
Rawurlencoded: %20

If the only issue the OP is having is that the spaces are being transformed from + to <space> then maybe just do a urlencode($_COOKIE['AUTH']) and try doing the base64 decode off of that.  This assumes that urlencode() Doesn't mangle other data in the cookie data.

Or a string replace " " to "+".

Kind of a non-technical answer, so maybe there's a better way to do this.  Maybe a setting in apache or PHP.  Don't really have time to research it right now, just wanted to point out the urlencode() and rawurlencode() info.

PHP manual pages here:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.rawurlencode.php

-TG

= = = Original message = = =

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Fletcher Mattox [mailto:fletcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 2:49 PM
> To: php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re:  base64-encoding in cookies?
> 
> I wrote:
> 
> > A campus web server (not under my control) returns an authentication
> > string in a cookie named AUTH.  The cookie's value is an encrypted,
> > base64 encoded string.  Unfortunately, when I examine $_COOKIE['AUTH'],
> > it is clear that all of the '+' characters have been replaced with a ' '
> > character in the base64 string.  Why is this?  Obviously, this corrupts
> > the data and makes it impossible to base64-decode the string correctly.
> > I believe this is a php issue and not, say, an apache issue because a
> > perl program can correctly authenticate the same cookie based on perl's
> > $ENV'HTTP_COOKIE'.  i.e., the perl cookie contains the original '+'.
> > Does anyone know how to make php (v5.1.5) do the right thing with base64
> > encoded cookies?
> 
> This problem seems to be
> 
> ~http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=35523
> 
> where it was dismissed as "Bogus" without any explanation why.  It seems
> that '+' characters are intentionally converted to spaces in all cookies.
> This makes no sense to me.  Can someone explain it?
> 
> Thanks,
> Fletcher
> 
> --
> PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
> 

Could it have something to do with url encoding?

For example:
http://example.com/page.php?foo=ABC+123

echo $_GET['foo']; // should produce: ABC 123

http://example.com/page.php?foo=ABC%2B123

echo $_GET['foo']; // should produce: ABC+123

HTH,

Brad

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