What is %5C?

PHP
1

What is this character:

%5C

Anybody knows?

2

Hi Richard,

It’s the ‘\’ character urlencoded.

3

could be url encoded \

4

I see… don’t know why all urls on one of my sites suddenly included %5C instead of backslashes… I didn’t urlencode() them.

5

I have a folder called ‘tools’ on my localhost. In that folder I have PHP files which do general handy tasks like conversions, calculations etc.

I have one for urldecoding, which is simply echoing the $_GET variable. I just need to go to this url http://localhost/tools/urldecode?q=%5C and it outputs the correct character.

Using Opera (I think firefox has this too) I have shortcuts in my URL bar, like ‘g something’ goes to a google search page with ‘something’ as the search term. So all I need to do is put ‘ud %5C’ in the URL bar and voila.

It comes in handy quite alot. Examples are:


_________Address Bar______________|_______Output______
MD5 abc123                                   | e99a18c428cb38d5f260853678922e03
rr 'Hello (.*)' - 'Name: \\1' - 'Hello Bob' | Name: Bob
ud %5C                                         | \\
sr localhost tools  3                         | localhost tools localhost tools localhost tools