php - file_get_contents - Special characters in URL - Special case

Question

I'm not getting file_get_contents() to return the page in this particular case where the url contains an '?' character.

$url = "https://se.timeedit.net/web/liu/db1/schema/s/s.html?tab=3&object=CM_949A11_1534_1603_DAG_DST_50_?VRIGT_1_1&type=subgroup&startdate=20150101&enddate=20300501"
print file_get_contents($url);

How do I make file_get_contents() work as expected on this url?

I have tried following solutions whithout a working result:

1.

print rawurlencode(utf8_encode($url));

2.

print mb_convert_encoding($url, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");

3.

$url = urlencode($url);
print file_get_contents($url);

4.

$content = file_get_contents($url);
print mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($content, 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1', true));

Found in these questions:

file_get_contents - special characters in URL

PHP get url with special characters without urlencode:ing them!

file_get_contents() Breaks Up UTF-8 Characters

UPDATE: As you can see a page is actually returned in my example but it is not the expected page, the one you get when you type the url in the browser.

Answer 1

URLs cannot contain "?"! Start from this basic premise. Any characters not within a narrowly defined subset of ASCII must be URL-encoded to be represented within a URL. The right way to do that is to urlencode or rawurlencode (depending on which format the server expects) the individual segment of the URL, not the URL as a whole.

E.g.:

$url = sprintf('https://se.timeedit.net/web/liu/db1/schema/s/s.html?tab=3&object=%s&type=subgroup&startdate=20150101&enddate=20300501',
               rawurlencode('CM_949A11_1534_1603_DAG_DST_50_?VRIGT_1_1'));

You will still need to use the correct encoding for the string! ? in ISO-8859-1 would be URL encoded to %D6, while in UTF-8 it would be encoded to %C3%96. Which one is the correct one depends on what the server expects.