Dynamic links in Drupal

Question

This must be an easy one but I can't find documentation for it online.

I'm trying to use the l() function in Drupal to create a dynamic link. What's the syntax?

At the moment I have:

l('Destination',"path/$user->uid/category")

which points to:

path/%2Fcategory

Answer 1

Try concatenating the strings instead.
l('Destination',"path/".$user->uid."/category")

as for the documentation, here it is: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/l/4.7

l($text, 
   $path, 
   $attributes = array(), 
   $query = NULL, 
   $fragment = NULL, 
   $absolute = FALSE, 
   $html = FALSE)

Answer 2

first of all, if you're working within a function, you'll need to get access to the global user object.

Secondly, if the user is anonymous/not logged in, the $user->uid might not be set or be 0.

lastly to prevent errors, it is common to concatenate variables together with strings

global $user;
if ($user->uid)
{
  l('Destination', 'path/'.$user->uid.'/category')
}

Answer 3

l() is correcting your URL to path/%2Fcategory because it's trying to make a workable link from the string path//category.

Your string is path//category because $user->uid has no value. It has no value because either you haven't pulled up a user object from global $user or user_load(), or your user is anonymous.

I would suggest putting checking the value of $user before calling l(), for example:

global $user; // or $user = user_load($foo);
if ($user) {
l('Destination', 'path/'.$user->uid.'/category');
} else {
l('Destination', 'path/you-are-not-logged-in');
}

Answer 4

The documentation for the l() function is located at: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/l/6

Other stuff has been said yet by others :)