Copied-and-pasted domain name getting ‎ added to end

Question

When I copy a domain name from Google Maps and then paste it into a form I built, it enters it into a MySQL database with ‎ appended at the end of the domain name.

Any idea how I could strip that ‎ off of the domain name?

The relevant code is below

<div class="friend5title"><label for="url">Website:</label></div> 
    <div class="friend5field"><input name="website" type="text" id="website" maxlength="150"></div>



$website = mysql_real_escape_string($website);

mysql_query("INSERT INTO submission VALUES ('$website')");

have you tried trim? `trim(mysql_real_escape_string($website));` And some info about that character: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark — Green Black, Aug 17 '12 at 22:59
Not sure why it's happening, but that character is left-to-right mark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark — Barmar, Aug 17 '12 at 23:20

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 23 '21 at 23:50

It is a control character ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark ).

Ignore all of my previous answer I just realized (since I wrote quickly) it isn't in unicode it is actually in a HTML entity format so you need to strip that HTML entity out:

preg_replace('/(&#8206;)/', '', $string);

An alternative is to actually purify your string and purge it of all HTML entities since it shouldn't really have any in it. Normally there could be special characters like & but these should not exist in a URL taken from an input field I reckon.

Here is a question about removing HTML entities with a solid answer: How to remove html special chars?

As to why it is happening: it is possible that someone has a foreign browser which artifically makes the text in inputs go a certain way but in turn by adding this html entity.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 17 '12 at 23:45

On pasting in the input field you did copy a left-to-right character, with unicode number 8206. As the browser evidently did have a form not in some unicode character set (like UTF-8), it sent to the server that character as numeric entity ‎. The server has to decode these, or the form (and page) has to be changed to accept UTF-8.

In the case of your LTR-character, it seems superfluous. You could add an onchange=... to remove characters < 0 and > 127 for the URL. They still are characters, so that is easily done.

Copied-and-pasted domain name getting ‎ added to end

2 Answers2