How do I extract query parameters from a URL string in PHP?

Question

Users can input URLs using a HTML form on my website, so they might enter something like this: http://www.example.com?test=123&random=abc, it can be anything. I need to

Answer 1

You can use parse_url and parse_str like this:

$query = parse_url('http://www.example.com?test=123&random=abc', PHP_URL_QUERY);
parse_str($query, $params);
$test = $params['test'];

parse_url allows to split an URL in different parts (scheme, host, path, query, etc); here we use it to get only the query (test=123&random=abc). Then we can parse the query with parse_str.