Get PHP to stop replacing '.' characters in $_GET or $_POST arrays?

Question

If I pass PHP variables with . in their names via $_GET PHP auto-replaces them with _ characters. For example:

<?php
echo "url is ".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."<p>";
echo "x.y is ".$_GET['x.y'].".<p>";
echo "x_y is ".$_GET['x_y'].".<p>";

... outputs the following:

url is /SpShipTool/php/testGetUrl.php?x.y=a.b
x.y is .
x_y is a.b.

... my question is this: is there any way I can get this to stop? Cannot for the life of me figure out what I've done to deserve this

PHP version I'm running with is 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.3.

Answer 1

Here's PHP.net's explanation of why it does it:

Dots in incoming variable names

Typically, PHP does not alter the names of variables when they are passed into a script. However, it should be noted that the dot (period, full stop) is not a valid character in a PHP variable name. For the reason, look at it:

<?php
$varname.ext;  /* invalid variable name */
?>

Now, what the parser sees is a variable named $varname, followed by the string concatenation operator, followed by the barestring (i.e. unquoted string which doesn't match any known key or reserved words) 'ext'. Obviously, this doesn't have the intended result.

For this reason, it is important to note that PHP will automatically replace any dots in incoming variable names with underscores.

That's from http://ca.php.net/variables.external.

Also, according to this comment these other characters are converted to underscores:

The full list of field-name characters that PHP converts to _ (underscore) is the following (not just dot):

• chr(32) ( ) (space)
• chr(46) (.) (dot)
• chr(91) ([) (open square bracket)
• chr(128) - chr(159) (various)

So it looks like you're stuck with it, so you'll have to convert the underscores back to dots in your script using dawnerd's suggestion (I'd just use str_replace though.)