PHP and mySql -- Help with retrieving query terms from a url?

Question

I am using PHP and mySql to build a page that users can use to search a recipe database. The search part of the page works fine-- now, I'm trying to create a page called displayrecipe that will display whatever recipe the user selects. A snippet of my code is:

$encodedRecipeName = urlencode($recipeName);
echo " $recipeName ";


The above code creates links similar to the one below (grilled chicken salad is just an example... it could be ANY recipe name in the database):
displayrecipe? grilled+chicken+salad

What code do I need on my displayrecipe page to retrieve the "grilled+chicken+salad" part of the url (preferably without the +'s)?

(I'll add more details if need be... please just ask)

Answer 1

First suggestion would be to change your html code to something of the sort :
$encodedRecipeName = urlencode($recipeName);
echo " $recipeName ";

Thus, you can access the query string from the variable `q` directly by using $q (if register_globals is set to On) or from some of the global arrays. This variable will have these values as space seperated, so u can just explode on " " to get the list.

But, if for whatever reasons you are unable to do the above, you can try to explore $GLOBALS or $_SERVER variable(by print_r($_SERVER)), here u will be able to find quite a few other ways of accessing the values.

Answer 2

First off, change your snippet like so:

$encodedRecipeName = rawurlencode($recipeName);
echo " $recipeName ";

(Replace urlencode() with rawurlencode(), replace the backward slash with a forward slash, add quotes around the hyperlink, and get rid of the space after the question mark.)

Then, inside displayrecipe, you can write:

$query = rawurldecode($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);

which will set your $query to "griled chicken salad".

A more common way of doing this, however, would be:

$encodedRecipeName = rawurlencode($recipeName);
echo " $recipeName ";

Then, the recipe name will be accessible as $_GET['name'].