IPN verifications fails / ambigious information in Paypal developer guides / PHP

[iFlash]

General information

• Environment: Production
• Language, language version, and OS: PHP 7

Issue description

Valid transactions are are returned as "INVALID" in some cases. The "hack" to encode the field "payment_date" manually (as introduced in the php example in this git) only seems to solve this issue in some cases.

When there are special characters in the name and/or address (üäß etc), there sometimes seems to be an issue as well.

The developer guide claims that instead if "urlencode/urldecode" one should use "rawurlencode/rawurldecode" does not work – all verficiations fail using that fix. Also, the PHP example in this git does not even use this.

Can Paypal (after YEARS) provide a decent documentation and example as what is necessary regarding encoding (including charset if that is an issue), please?

[BarbzYHOOL]

I totally approve what you said, this is crazy bullshit. I've seen amateur work much better than that and I'm still stuck with the exact issues you mentioned above (I don't get a "+" in payment_date, so no idea what's causing the issue tho)