Prevent CakePHP from stripping chars from url passed as param? - string

Question

I am developing an application using CakePHP 2.6 and having issues with passing a string containing url characters as a parameter through to a controller method.
In my view I have a chunk of code which echoes out a series of table rows containing data and passes through the page id, unit id and the id of the link which can sometimes contain a url.
<?php foreach($linklist as $l) { ?>
<tr id="Link_<?php echo $l['ID']; ?>">
<td><?php echo $l['Title']; ?></td>
<td class="buttontd"><?php echo $this->Form->postlink('Delete', array('action' => 'deletelink', $this->request->params['pass'][0], $results[0]['PageUnitTypeID'], $l['ID']), array('class' => 'button delete')); ?></td>
</tr>
<?php } ?>
When the postlink button passes the information over to the 'deletelink' action in the controller the url looks like this:
http://mydomainname.com/webpages/deletelink/239/7/urlhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F
Which shows that the url has been passed as the string but then in the action when I try to just var_dump() the third parameter it returns a string of www.google.co.uk and nothing more which is preventing me from doing a substr() call on the parameter to check if the first 3 characters are equal to url or not.
I have tried to wrap the parameter in the postlink call inside serialize() and urlencode() but neither has had the desired effect of returning the full string as
urlhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F
Does anyone know of a successful way to pass through a parameter like this without losing important characters?
Update 1: Deletelink action
public function deletelink($pid = null, $uid = null, $lid = null) {
$this->autoRender = false;
if (!is_null($pid) && is_numeric($pid) && !is_null($uid) && is_numeric($uid)) {
if (!is_null($lid)) {
if (substr($lid, 0, 3) == 'url') {
echo substr($lid, 0, 3);
} else {
echo substr($lid, 0, 3);
}
} else {
$this->Session->setFlash('It is unknown which link you wish to delete from the webpage', 'flash_message_bar', array('class' => 'error'));
return $this->redirect(array('action' => 'edit', $pid));
}
} else {
$this->Session->setFlash('It is unknown which on which webpage you wish to delete a link', 'flash_message_bar', array('class' => 'error'));
return $this->redirect(array('action' => 'index'));
}
}

Answer 1

CakePHP (or mod_rewrite I would say) is getting confused with the way your URL is formed.
Your safest option is to base64_encode the url parameter in the view, which will result in call similar to:
http://mydomainname.com/webpages/deletelink/239/7/dXJsaHR0cDovL3d3dy5nb29nbGUuY28udWsv
and base64_decode it later in the action, which will transform
dXJsaHR0cDovL3d3dy5nb29nbGUuY28udWsv
into
urlhttp://www.google.co.uk/