Header Test

I originally created this page while I was trying to lear a thing or two about PHP. Since then I've become a .NET programmer and don't do much with PHP. However, I'm always trying to learn new things.

Originally, this page simply dumped out all the available request and server variables available to this page. That output is still visible at the bottom of this page.

But, now, I've added the following sections which are what people were hoping to find when they first landed on this page.

Parsing Posted Forms

Here is a form that will post back onto this page for processing. Fill out the form and click the "Submit" button (nothing gets stored, it is just sample data).

Getting a Specific Value

To get the value of a specific key that you want, you can simply use syntax such as

echo($_POST["key_name"]);

If you haven't already, submit the form above, to see the value of the "favorite_food" input.

Parsing Query Strings

Next, I'd like to go over parsing information passed in the query string.

For the true newbies (I'm guessing there's a few reading this page), a Query String is the information that is appended to a page name when making a page request.

For Example, in "http://www.tomasvera.com/header_test.php?key1=value1&key2=value2" the bold text is the query string. Here's a link to a Wikipedia entry on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string

Here's a link that will reload this page and allow you to see this in action:
Submit For Parsing.

You will notice that the code is almost identical to the code used to parse the form, above. The reason for this is at the Form's information and the QueryString information is passed to the page as a Name-Value Pair collection.

Once you have a "handle" to the collection, you can simply iterate through the collection to find the value you want or dump out all the values, as I have done in these examples.

Well, that's a quick-n-dirty on parsing form and query string submissions in PHP. I hope you found this useful.

If you have any comments or questions, you may Contact me via this site.