Question about Query String

PHP
1

Typically when I think of a query string, I think of the stuff that comes after the ? following the domain, for example…

Example #1:

But while playing around with $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’], I am now confused!

Let’s say I have another URL like this…

When I run $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’], I see something like this…

Example #2:

Questions:
1.) So which of these two examples is a Query String?

2.) What do you call the part that comes before the “?”

3.) What do you call the part that comes after the “?”

2

Is this because you’ve got a redirect working that is actually rewriting your URL in the second example?

3

On my current project I am using mod_rewrite because my client wants one of those nice looking URLs.

So this would be closer to what I am actually using…

Regardless, I have always called the part after the “?” the “Query String”.

But it looks like PHP’s function uses the terms to mean something different.

In my 3 questions above, I just want to make sure I am referring to things using the proper names!

4

You are naming them correctly.

Apache passes the “nice URL” to PHP so as far as PHP is concerned the URL being used is not the “nice” one.

5

You’re looking at it from a humanistic perspective. You need to look at it through the machine perspective. The querystring would include the gender even though it doesn’t follow the ?

I would venture to guess that you see something like RewriteRule ^/?([a-zA-Z_]+)/([a-zA-Z_]+)$ index.php?gender=$1&category=$2 [L]

So it will take the two items here and pre-pend them onto the existing querystring. You’ll just need to account for those two items in your querystring processing…

1 Like
6

Okay.

Correct.

So this whole topic came up because I am writing code to parse up the submitted URL and stick it in a log.

My code is working, but I found myself getting confused because I never really realized how Apache was prepending things onto the Query String.

Is there another name I could use to call the whole prepended Query String, or am I stuck with two similar Query Strings?

Maybe the long one could be called the “Server Query String”, and the traditional one after the ? could be called the “URL Query String”? :confused:

7

I would probably call it “rewritten query string”

8

And is it Apache or PHP that is rewriting the “nice URL” to make the longer “rewritten Query String”?

9

where does this happen??

10

So the user submits the nice URL with a query string after the ?, and Apache rewrites the nice URL to a standard URL where the “nice” part now becomes part of the “Query String”, right?

And then PHP takes this extended “Query String” and returns the whole thing when I use $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’], right?

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11

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