rawurlencode not rendering correctly in anchor tag?

Question

EE Version. 2.7.3

I am running rawurlencode on a field in a channel called description to encode it to pass on correctly to twitters sharing url string inside my template.

Example input: Check Out Company Names Latest Post!

so the result should be

 Check%20Out%20Company%20Names%20Latest%20Post!

When I echo it outside of the anchor tag it renders correctly with the proper encoding, but as soon as I echo out the variable inside the anchor tag, the %20 encoding is not rendered and regular spaces are in the URL again.

PHP

<?php   
    $description =  rawurlencode('{description}');
?>

Output:

 <a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<?php echo $description; ?> {site_url}" class="popup">

Any ideas what's wrong?

Answer 1

It looks like you need to enable PHP in your template.

Alternatively, you could use a plugin for the URL encoding. For example URL Encode or CE String.

It's generally considered not the best practice to enable PHP in templates when an existing plugin or a custom-built plugin allows you to avoid it. Some rationale for that is in this Stack Overflow post, Is there ever a good reason to use PHP inside ExpressionEngine templates?