Question

I have very basic pagination script and search form with ~4 fields, and action="get" now my problem is that, when i submit my form, i get url like this:

user/people/1/?search=true&country=uk&age=20&online=true ... and so on

so after i submit form everything is just fine, but when i go to page 2 my url changes to:

 user/people/2 

so my search parameters disappears, this is how i render my links

 href="user/people/<?=$next?>"

So my question is what is the best way to keep my paramenters, because now i can only think of for loop and build my link by merging all $_GET values, should i do it like that?

Answer 1

Just append $_SERVER[ 'QUERY_STRING' ] (make sure to htmlspecialchars() it first).

href="user/people/<?php echo htmlspecialchars( "{$next}?{$_SERVER[ 'QUERY_STRING' ]}" ); ?>"

By the way, the PHP short tags <?= ?> are not portable, so you should consider not using those, and using <?php echo ?> instead.

Update:

@Wrikken raises a couple of good points in their answer:

1) passing ENT_QUOTES as the second argument to htmlspecialchars() would be important if single-quoting the attribute value (or to cover it being changed to being single-quoted in the future). This is easy to forget, for me anyway, since I almost always double-quote attribute values. It’s unfortunate that it further bloats a call that’s already bloated by a long function name.

2) If you’re just passing through the query string as-is, then I’d certainly prefer using $_SERVER[ 'QUERY_STRING' ] instead of http_build_query( $_GET ). If, however, you need to change some of the query params, http_build_query() would be the ticket. You can see an example of that in my PHP faceted browser.