How to get and disect the query string appended into a url? PHP

Question

I am trying to develop a PHP class which would enable me to get the query string appended into a url and process it according to the variables passed. How can this be done?

Answer 1

If you want access to the URL parameters as a string you can use this:

$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']

But, I'm not sure how that would be any more useful than $_GET. You said:

I wont be sure of the variable names

You can iterate through the $_GET array with a foreach loop:

foreach ($_GET as $key => $val) {
    echo $key . ": " . $val;
}

However... if you're talking about an arbitrary URL (not necessarily the one which was requested), then the above methods won't work since they obviously won't be in $_GET. Instead you can use parse_url

$url = 'http://username:password@hostname/path?arg=value#anchor';

print_r(parse_url($url));

echo parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY);

Output:

Array
(
    [scheme] => http
    [host] => hostname
    [user] => username
    [pass] => password
    [path] => /path
    [query] => arg=value
    [fragment] => anchor
)
arg=value