Accessing very long URLs from PHP Options

[Brian Chandler]

The other day I discovered the wonders of the Google chart API, and here's my sample:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300...2|100,100|50,50

I'm trying to make a local copy (since I only need to generate the chart every so often), but both the PHP copy() function and the CURL library seem to choke on a URL of this length -- Google returns 400 Bad Request. I guess it is being chopped off at 512 characters [?], since it seems to be able to access the following shorter chart OK:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300...2|100,100|50,50

Any suggestions for a quick way around this?


Separate question....

Can't find anything at Google about character encoding for text captions etc. Does anyone know if it accepts UTF-8 or whatever?

[Brian Chandler]

Just to answer my own question: I tried fopen(), I tried CURL, I tried using POST to send the parameters (doesn't work), and I tried calling wget....

Then I realised that I had html-ified the URL, with & in place of & ... so no wonder it wouldn't work.

Grr!