What is the limitation of using GET to retrieve a target page, specifically in handling special characters like "&"?

When using GET to retrieve a target page, special characters like "&" can cause issues because they are reserved characters in URLs and can be misinterpreted as query string separators. To handle special characters like "&" properly, you can use PHP's urlencode() function to encode the special characters before appending them to the URL. 

// Encode the special characters like "&" before appending them to the URL
$param1 = urlencode("value1");
$param2 = urlencode("value2");

// Construct the URL with the encoded parameters
$url = "https://example.com/target_page.php?param1=$param1&param2=$param2";

// Retrieve the target page using GET with the encoded URL
$response = file_get_contents($url);

// Output the response
echo $response;

Keywords

GET target page special characters handling limitations

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