How to remove \ (backslash) from link?

Question

How to remove \ from links I got from scraping.

Example:

https:\\/\\/graph.facebook.com\\/v1.0\\/159463177547058\\/photos?fields=source\u00252Cname&limit=100&after=MjA4MTA5NTMyNjgyNDIy

Is there any way?

just search the stackoverflow you can self answer this in couple of minutes — CS GO, May 22 '14 at 12:38

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 22 '14 at 12:41

3

Try feeding it into stripslashes().

$no_slashes_url = stripslashes("https:\/\/graph.facebook.com\/v1.0\/159463177547058\/photos?fields=source\u00252Cname&limit=100&after=MjA4MTA5NTMyNjgyNDIy");

answered May 22 '14 at 12:41

Mark

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@HugoRocha no that method does something completely different. – Ian May 22 '14 at 12:43
@Ian okay. I know nothing from PHP. I would use string builder in C#. – Malavos May 22 '14 at 12:45
No it does not work. `\u00252` is `%`, but with this function it will simply drop the `\ ` and leave `u00252` as part of the string. – Havenard May 22 '14 at 12:54
1

@Havenard is correct. He got to it before I did, so please see his answer. – Mark May 22 '14 at 12:56

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 22 '14 at 12:54

This is an escaped sequence where special symbols are replaced by it's escape equivalent.

Usually, you can revert this by using stripslashes(). Howover, this escape sequence uses \u for UNICODE symbols which is not supported by PHP.

But you can use this little hack instead:

$raw = "https:\\/\\/graph.facebook.com\\/v1.0\\/159463177547058\\/photos?fields=source\u00252Cname&limit=100&after=MjA4MTA5NTMyNjgyNDIy";
$url = json_decode('"'.$raw.'"');

This function converts UNICODE escaped symbols into it's UTF-8 equivalents. Only because this is an URL we can trust those UNICODE escaped sequences will be safely converted to ASCII without issues, preserving the URL functionality.

This should be the accepted answer (although the upvotes for @Mark's answer are still valid, because in a 'normal' situation that would be the one). — giorgio, May 22 '14 at 14:11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 22 '14 at 12:39

1

str_replace() would be a good place to start

http://pt2.php.net/str_replace

answered May 22 '14 at 12:39

Ian

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How are you using it? – Ian May 22 '14 at 12:42
1

Keep in mind that "unescaping" is something completely different to just removing backslashes! Just think of special control characters that will break on str_replace. – ToBe May 22 '14 at 12:49

How to remove \ (backslash) from link?

3 Answers3