Sunny Man’s Blog

February 13th 2007

(1) PHP Lesson 7

Educational, Programming, Tutorials

My lessons are now into their second week and we’ve still got a way to go yet. This week we will be looking into IF and WHILE statements, $_GET, $_POST and we’ll also look into arrays near the end of the week.

In the previous lesson we went into detail about IF and WHILE statements and in Friday’s big round up I introduced you to $_POST and $_GET. Today we’re going to look further at $_GET and what it’s used for.

Lesson 7: $_GET and URLs

When we have a URL that includes the values of certain variables, we can use this to get the values. Say we had a URL like this:

http://www.eop.org.uk/index.php?name=sunny%20man&cool=yes

We use $_GET to grab the values of the name and cool variables. Obviously this isn’t a secure way to transport variables around your site - we’ll look at a more secure way later on into the tutorials - this is the most simple way.

<?php
$name = $_GET['name']; //$name = “sunny man”
$cool = $_GET[’cool’]; //$cool = “yes”
?>

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about $_POST and how it can be confusing when to use the name and id attributes on form field inputs.