Question

I’ve never understood this, and on my own projects I have never needed it. But I’ve been contributing to WordPress a little, and they use it heavily.

Somehow they are able to redirect the user to a different page with some sort of GET variable in the URL (which is what I understand to be the advantage of using GET over POST). How do they do this? Is it as simple as making a header like header('site.com/page.php?foo=true');? This can’t be useful since you have to hard code everything in (unless you want to create a string based on other variables which is kind of annoying, even still). I thought there would be a built-in function like send_get('page.php', $foo);.

I understand how to use information by using $foo = $_GET['foo'];, but I don’t know how to send it with PHP.

An explanation would be appreciated – thanks!

Answer 1

There isn’t exactly a “customary” way of using it. It is one of nine superglobals. The way you use them is at your discretion. As Greg P already mentioned, they are passed through the URL.

I know how to set up a HTML form that sends variables this way, but how can I do the same thing with PHP?

If you’re talking about sending GET variables with PHP solely, the answer is no. You needn’t even have PHP to send a GET variable. It is as simple as adding a question mark followed by a variable name = something. Separate several of them using an ampersand (&)

Setting up a GET variable is as easy as creating an anchor link.
<a href='somepage.php?getVar1=foo&anotherVariable=2&thirdVar=3

You can use PHP to dynamically place certain information in there instead of writing it manually, which is the entire purpose of the language to begin with. It is a preprocessor

So, something like this should get you started

<?php
$someID = // An id pulled from a mysql_query
echo "<a href='somepage.php?someID=" . $someID . "'>GET LINK</a>";

I thought there would be a built-in function like send_get(‘page.php’, $foo);

Again, PHP is a preprocessor. It doesn’t send information, it only outputs it. What you’re talking about is Javascript.. moreover, AJAX. AJAX is the only method that will allow you to send GET variables “behind-the-scenes”. And, like was mentioned in another post, jQuery has an awesome codebase for this.