Question

I’ve been wondering what links like http://example.com/filename.php?dosomething and http://somesite.net?logoff do.

As I don’t know much about PHP, and english isn’t my native language, I’ve been unable to find good information like this.

I know that http://mysite.com/edit.php?editpassword and http://mysite.com/edit.php?editname could serve totally different content, but how can I implement it?

Let’s say that I want to implement these lines of code to ?editpassword

Password
<input type="password" name="password">
<input type="submit">

and these lines to ?editname

Type your name
<input type="text" name="name">
<input type="submit">

How could I do it in a file that could contain

<?php 
require "includes/head.php"; 
require "includes/nav.php";
if(!isset($_SESSION['login'])){
    header("Location: index.php");
}
?>



            <div class="row-fluid">
        <div class="span3">
          <div class="well sidebar-nav">
            <ul class="nav nav-list">
            <li class="nav-header">New</li>
              <li><a href="#">sss</a></li>

            </ul>
          </div><!--/.well -->
        </div><!--/span-->
        <div class="span9">
          <div class="row-fluid">
            <div class="span9">
              <h2>Some header</h2>
              <p>Some text</p>
            </div><!--/span-->
          </div><!--/row-->
          <div class="row-fluid">
            ?editname & ?editpassword should appear here.
      </div><!--/row-->

            <?php require "includes/footer.php"; ?>

something like that?

Answer 1

If there’s just ?foo the whole querystring which is available in $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] is "foo".

When using a HTML form with method="GET" you get key-value pairs which are then available via $_GET['key']. Actually you also receive those pairs when using POST but then they are not visible in the URL and you access them via $_POST['key'].

---

So your code would look like this assuming you want it totally simple and not use some advanced routing framework:

switch($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) {
    case 'editname':
        // do stuff
        break;
    case 'editpassword':
        // do stuff
        break;
    default:
        // do stuff if none of the cases matched
}

But I’d really suggest you to use proper GET variables instead of just plain query strings. Simply replace the first line of that snipped with this:

$action = isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) ? $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] : '';
switch($action) {