Question

I’ve got this text

“?foo=bar&foobar=barfoo”

what is the best way to convert this text to variables? Like this:

<?php
echo $q['foo']; //bar
echo $q['foobar']; //barfoo
?>

Thanks.

Answer 1

see http://docs.php.net/parse_str and http://docs.php.net/parse_url

$s = "?foo=bar&foobar=barfoo";
parse_str(parse_url($s, PHP_URL_QUERY), $q);
var_dump($q);

prints

array(2) {
  ["foo"]=>
  string(3) "bar"
  ["foobar"]=>
  string(6) "barfoo"
}

edit: If you know the string always has the form ?x=y… you might want to skip parse_url() and use substr() instead.
edit2: Keep in mind that the behavior of parse_str() depends on the value of arg_separator.input. Should you set it (for whatever reason) to something like ‘!’ parse_string() will return NULL for your input string.
e.g.

ini_set('arg_separator.input', '!');
$s = "foo=bar&foobar=barfoo";
var_dump(parse_str($s));

prints NULL. But …that would be a rather odd setting.