mysterious whitespace when putting a string togehter

This may seem odd but I'm simply trying to put a url together. The first part ($first) I get from user input using strrpos() and substr() with "/". The exact file I want to get to is fixed ($second) so all I think I need to do is this:

$first = "http://www.somedomain.de/somepath/";
$second = "thexml.xml";
$url = $first.$second;

BUT: Although I use trim() on every part there still is some whitespace between the two parts when I print $url.

When I try to navigate to $url the whitespace is replaced by a "%". The path itself is correct, when I get rid of the whitespace/ % manually in my browser's adress bar.

I also tried putting the two strings together with an array and implode() but the output stays the same. What am I doing wrong?

Update from Lisa

ok, so I printed $first开发者_Go百科 and $second separately and there are no whitespaces. it seems to be appearing when I concatenate them and exactly where the two strings are put together.

Any other ideas?

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ok, so I printed $first and $second separately and there are no whitespaces. it seems to be appearing when I concatenate them and exactly where the two strings are put together.

Any other ideas?

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Most likely, the code you're editing or the inputs (user, database, etc.) is not what you expect. Try trimming down (no pun intended) the code to a minimal example. For example, go from

$first = "http://www.somedomain.de/somepath/";
$second = "thexml.xml";
$url = $first.$second;
echo $url; // No space

to

$first = $_POST['url'];
$second = "thexml.xml";
$url = $first.$second;
echo $url; // If this contains a space, the input contains the offending space

step-by-step to find the mistake.

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Have you tried rawurlencode? http://php.net/rawurlencode

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I know this is a very old question but I just had this similar issue and was finally able to find a solution.

My solution is to use the trim function like this:

$url = trim($first).$second;