Morning everyone --

Can anyone help me with what is probably very simple?

I have a page where I want to get a variable from the URL and display it... so if my url is http://www.mysite.com/page.html?variable=hi

I want to get that "hi" out of there and print it out to the page.

Thanks in advance!

Nevermind - I got it.

how?

please tell

It depends. It can be done in Javascript or using a serverside language.

Which would you rather do?

For reference, that part of the URL is called the 'query string'.

Server side langauges often have simplified interfaces to access the 'variables' in a query string. Javascript has no such interface; but it is possible to get reference to the entire URL of a page (address + query string), and to split that down into its component parts.

An example is here:

http://www.activsoftware.com/code_sa..._in_JavaScript

(That's a somewhat wasteful procedure if you want to repeatadly get at the different variables in a query string; but its not too bad if you have alot of potential variables and are only interested in a few of them)

Um, the java script lokos hard, could you please tell me how i would retrive the variable text, just the text, onto a page using php? or another server side language

With PHP you simple use the
$_GET['variable'];

Variable. For example if you had a link

www.daniweb.com/fakeurl.html?id=12

Your PHP would be:


this would output 12

cool, thanks

You can do it only with php.

You can do it with any serverside language, and any client side script should be able to get the query string indirectly from the page URL.

PHP does it through Zend, which does it through C++; and it's delivered into an application's environment by the server software; so clearly, you can access it using other means than only PHP.

I'm sure you meant something different; and I don't mean to bite your head off; but there's a full wealth of ways in which you can access that data, PHP is one way to do it.