Should PHP header headers be encoded?

Question

Should PHP header headers be encoded?

header("Location: ".$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]); header("Location: ".rawurlencode($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"])); 

If so, why, when and how?

Answer 1

You only need to encode it if you have any special characters (defined in RFC1806 ) in your URL. Especially you should encode all URLs with the following characters: {} | \ ^ ~ [] `(with RFC1738)