CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpurl
Allen S
Allen S

Reputation: 3539

PHP: ? and & in URLs - what's the difference?

what is the difference between ? and & in URLs?

e.g. http://www.site.com/index.php?someVar=value&otherVar=value

Upvotes: 3

Views: 7306

Answers (2)

Nanne
Nanne

Reputation: 64399

? means "here come the parameters", so it's the first
& means "here comes another parameter", so it's for consecutive values

Upvotes: 5

brianmearns
brianmearns

Reputation: 9967

The ? marks the beginning of the query string, the & is used to separate individual variables within the query string.

So for instance, I'll modify your example to be a little more clear:

http://www.site.com/index.php?someVar=firstVal&otherVar=secondVal

The "location" part of the URL is everything up to but not including the ?, so it would be simply:

http://www.site.com/index.php

This is what you're web server will use to find which script to execute. Then it will split off the query string (everything after the ?) and pass that to your script (or more accurately, to PHP). The query string would be all of:

someVar=firstVal&otherVar=secondVal

PHP will then parse the query string, using the & as the delimiter between variables. So this query string would include two variables: someVar with value firstVal, and otherVar with value secondVal.

PHP will store the results of parsing the query string in the $_GET super global variable, which is just an associative array where the keys are the names of the parameters, and the values are of course the associated values.

So in PHP, if you do var_dump($_GET) with this example, it will look like this:

array(2) {
  ["someVar"]=>
  string(5) "firstVal"
  ["otherVar"]=>
  string(5) "secondVal"
}

Upvotes: 19

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