Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By : Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu
Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By: Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu

Overview of this book

Do you want to build your own websites, but have never really been confident enough to turn your ideas into real projects? If your web development skills are a bit rusty, or if you've simply never programmed before, The PHP Workshop will show you how to build dynamic websites using PHP with the help of engaging examples and challenging activities. This PHP tutorial starts with an introduction to PHP, getting you set up with a productive development environment. You will write, execute, and troubleshoot your first PHP script using a built-in templating engine and server. Next, you'll learn about variables and data types, and see how conditions and loops help control the flow of a PHP program. Progressing through the chapters, you'll use HTTP methods to turn your PHP scripts into web apps, persist data by connecting to an external database, handle application errors, and improve functionality by using third-party packages. By the end of this Workshop, you'll be well-versed in web application development, and have the knowledge and skills to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with PHP.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Query Strings

A query string is part of a URL, containing data described in key-value pairs. Each key-value pair is delimited by the ampersand character (&), while the delimiter of a URL path from its query string is a question mark (?).

As an example, we'll use the following fictive URL:

https://www.bookstore.com/books/?category=Comics&page=2.

Here, the query string is category=Comics&page=2 and the parameters are category and page with Comics and 2 values, respectively. It is worth noting that the parameters that can hold data are then parsed as arrays of values. For example, given the /filter?tags[]=comics&tags[]=recent URI, the tags query string parameter will result in an array with two values – comics and recent.

Query strings are mostly used to access resources on the server, rather than as instructions to create, update, or delete. So, sharing a URL with a query string would list the same results in any browser, when no other contexts...