URL Query String Wont Work

[shockandaww]

Hello,

Yes, I have searched this forum. Yes, I have searched the stickies.

I am new. And undoubtedly the problem here is in front of the keyboard. I am following Kevin Yank's very nice beginners guide to MySQL and PHP. Here is the specific page I have a problem with. http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/...s/ddws/17.html

I have copied and pasted directly into the file and still cant get any value returned. The url query that is in the HTML looks like this,

<A HREF="welcome.php?name=Kevin"> Hi, I'm Kevin! </A>

The PHP like this,

<?php
  echo( "Welcome to our Web site, $name!" );
?>

The non working example is here: http://pixelsnot.com/db_test_site/hi.html.

I hope this easy enough for someone here. I'm sure it is. Thank you very much for your time.

My server is running PHP 5.2.17

[ParkinT]

There is some code you are not showing (or it is missing).
I no longer own that book - so cannot reference the page precisely - but you need to capture the GET parameter like this (above the code you posted)

<?php $name = $_GET['name']; ?>

Is there a paragraph in the book you missed? Did two pages stick together?

HTH

[Immerse]

It's quite possible that the book, if it's an older copy, might be using register_globals, which is evil, old and deprecated. Whatever you do, don't ever turn register_globals on. It will ruin your life and demand the soul of your first-born.

Register_globals makes all GET, POST, COOKIE fields available in your script as regular variables. While this seemed handy at first, it turns out it's a major security hole, which eventually lead to thousands of sites being defaced/ hacked.

As ParkinT shows, you need to specifically retrieve the variable you need from the superglobals it's in (GET, POST, COOKIE, ENV etc).

Edit>>
Just noticed you're using an online version of the guide. You might need to find an updated version of the guide, as this is a very very old version.

[shockandaww]

Thanks above!

I am familiar with turning register_globals off in a few projects. Since the guide isn't dated I wasn't sure if the world of PHP had changed around the tutorial. And that does indeed seem to be the case.

I used the _GET param and it worked great. Thank you. I will tread carefully though the rest of this lesson with an understanding that it is dated.

Thank you both very much for the help.