Pass special characters in PHP

I have a text field where where the user can pass wild cards - more specific to the question they can use '%' character.

I am using ajax to get the value and send it to a PHP file. If I enter '%BA' in the text file and retrieve the value using

document.getElementById('textfield').value

This actually gets '%BA'. I am using POST method to send it to a PHP file. But the variable displays as "�" in the web browser and inserts " ° - degree s开发者_如何学编程mall o" in the database.

I am sure there are other cases that I am not aware of as well. Is there a function in PHP to escape the special characters or any other way to get the exact string?

Edit: This may be a guess but doing escape(document.getElementById('textfield').value) to send the value and using urldecode($values[3]) to retrieve the value doesn't work. Maybe it's a js to PHP problem.

Update: urldecode will not work. Read the first comment in urldecode. Used the function there. Solved.

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while passing the value using ajax , you just encode the value with encodeURIComponent() function and use urldecode() function to decode it in the php file. This might solve the issue.

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You could encode the characters with urlencode (and maybe htmlspecialchars too) before storing it in the database, and use urldecode ( and maybe htmlspecialchars_decode) to decode them before displaying to the user.

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You can use escape in javascript i.e.

escape(document.getElementById('val'))