Online PHP editor | refs for EGcD5

<?php // this is hack until you can manage to resolve the encoding issue in a more professional manner // use $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] to extract the query string from the url $queryStrings = [ 'lat=25.79&amp%3Blon=-80.16', 'lat=41.46u0026lon%3D-82.71', 'lat%5Cu003d30.31%5Cu0026lon%5Cu003d-89.33', 'lat=28.94-89.4&lon', 'tag%5Cu003d44' ]; foreach ($queryStrings as $queryString) { // replace unicode-like substrings $queryString = preg_replace_callback('/u([\da-f]{4})/i', function ($match) { return mb_convert_encoding(pack('H*', $match[1]), 'UTF-8', 'UCS-2BE'); }, urldecode($queryString)); // courtesy of Gumbo: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2934602/2943403 $queryString = strtr($queryString, ['&' => '&', '\\' => '']); parse_str($queryString, $_GET); var_export($_GET); echo "\n"; }