Paypal IPN Change...

For any of those who have a Paypal IPN script to process automatically transactions through Paypal, you might have noticed some problems recently.

It transpires that Paypal have changed the way they manage escape characters, for instance apostrophes (') in the data.

Therefore you now need to pass back all the data sent by paypal to your site script AFTER having put all the variables through stripslashes (assuming you are using PHP) otherwise transactions with apostrophes in won't go through successfully.

For no apparent reason it doesn't seem Paypal have communicated this to IPN users; perhaps it was an accidental change but it's there nonetheless

Tim

Re : Paypal IPN Change

Thanks Tim, Noticed this too and had to change a couple of sites...

Dan
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Web Design

Re : Paypal IPN Change

Tim

Does this affect normal payment buttons on websites or is it something specific for certain payments?

Stephen

Re : Paypal IPN Change

It affects people who have a script on their site that picks up the results of transactions on the paypal server.

Re : Paypal IPN Change

Yes it's as Tim says.

It's useful if you run a website that lets people join via paypal, and then you want to do something when you know someone has paid.

So say you run a members only site, and you want to give people access when they pay you a tenner. If you use paypal IPN then your script can find out in real time when someone makes a payment, and then update your database of users to give them instant access.

It saves the hassle of having to manage accounts manually which, if you're lucky and have a site with a lot of business going through, would take up an increasingly large amount of time.

Cheers

Dan
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Web Design