Whats the best way to send multiple variables in a query string within a URL

Question

I have a client who is wanting to create a link which contains product codes so that his customers hit a page with just those products displayed in an attempt to increase conversion rates from affilliate sites.

My question is whats the best way to send these multiple products in a single URL

For example:

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/bespoke-list.php?catNo=234-324-232-343

Obviously then the site would grab the codes from the string and display them...

We're going to be using PHP!

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can certainly send the like you described, with - as separator. The querystring variables are stored in the $_GET array in PHP, so your example numbers can be accessed like this:

$ids = $_GET['catNo'];
$ids = explode('-', $ids);
foreach($ids as $id) {
  echo "<p>$id</p>"; //Do something with $id here.
}

Another way could be to store them directly as an array in the querystring, like this:

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/bespoke-list.php?id[]=234&id[]=324&id[]=232&id[]=343

Then you can get the ids directly without explode:

$ids = $_GET['id'];
foreach($ids as $id) {
  echo "<p>$id</p>"; //Do something with $id here.
}

But when I look at it, the first one is certainly a more attractive URL. :-)

Answer 2

If you want to make URL look better, you could do it by using .htaccess file.

Answer 3

I would construct the query string with a prefix for each product "catNo-" as follows:

catNo-1=234&catNo-2=324&catNo-3=232&catNo-4=343

The php code to parse the above query string:

<?php
$catNoPrefix = "catNo-";
foreach($_GET as $key => $value){
    if("FALSE" != strstr($key, $catNoPrefix )) {
        $idValue = $_GET[$key];
        echo "<p>$idValue</p>"; 
    }
}
?>