How to Get Parameters from a URL

Getting Parameters from a Normal URL

Normally, parameters are sent after the ? in a URL.

Example: https://example.com/page.php?article=this-title-is-not-clickbait

To access this variable, you can use the $_GET global variable.

$articleslug = $_GET['article'];    
if ($articleslug != "") {  
     echo "<p>Article Slug: " . htmlspecialchars($articleslug , ENT_QUOTES);       
}  

This would assign "this-title-is-not-clickbait" to the variable $articleslug.

Getting Parameters from a Friendly URL

If you are using friendly URLs that do not have a ?, you would use a different approach.

Example: https://example.com/article/this-title-is-not-clickbait

First, you would need to get the URL.

$url = "https://$_SERVER[HTTP_HOST]$_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]";

If you want the last part of the path, you could use this:

echo basename(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH));

It's output would be: "this-title-is-not-clickbait"

But if you want the whole path, not including the domain name, you would use this:

echo trim(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH), '/');

It's output would be "articles/this-title-is-not-clickbait"

Sanatizing Content

Don't forget to sanitize!

For output to the screen, use:

htmlspecialchars($_GET['id'], ENT_QUOTES)

For data going into a query, use:

pg_escape_string($_GET['username'])