php - Urlencode and file_get_contents

Question

We have an url like http://site.s3.amazonaws.com/images/some image @name.jpg inside $string

What I'm trying to do (yes, there is a whitespace around the url):

$string = urlencode(trim($string));
$string_data = file_get_contents($string);

What I get (@ is also replaced):

file_get_contents(http%3A%2F%2Fsite.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fimages%2Fsome+image+@name.jpg)[function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory

If you copy/paste http://site.s3.amazonaws.com/images/some image @name.jpg into browser address bar, image will open.

What's bad and how to fix that?

Answer 1

Using function urlencode() for entire URL, will generate an invalid URL. Leaving the URL as it is also is not correct, because in contrast to the browsers, the file_get_contents() function don't perform URL normalization. In your example, you need to replace spaces with %20:

$string = str_replace(' ', '%20', $string);