PHP to check if a URL contains a query string

Question

This is an easy one. There seem to be plenty of solutions to determine if a URL contains a specific key or value, but strangely I can't find a solution for determining if URL does or does not have a query at all.

Using PHP, I simply want to check to see if the current URL has a query string. For example: http://abc.com/xyz/?key=value VS. http://abc.com/xyz/.

Creekmore

Answer 1

For any URL as a string:

if (parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY))

http://php.net/parse_url

If it's for the URL of the current request, simply:

if ($_GET)

Kristlekristo

That worked. I was trying if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])) {echo 'has string';} else {echo 'no string';}with no luck. Thanks! – Creekmore

Note (to save others some time): 'just' if ($_GET) (for the current request) works because an empty array is false in a boolean if($x) context. See: php.net/manual/en/types.comparisons.php So indeed no need for count() or empty(). – Dichotomize

Answer 2

The easiest way is probably to check to see if the $_GET[] contains anything at all. This can be done with the empty() function as follows:

if(empty($_GET)) {
    //No variables are specified in the URL.
    //Do stuff accordingly
    echo "No variables specified in URL...";
} else {
    //Variables are present. Do stuff:
    echo "Hey! Here are all the variables in the URL!\n";
    print_r($_GET);
}

Redoubt

Answer 3

parse_url seems like the logical choice in most cases. However I can't think of a case where '?' in a URL would not denote the start of a query string so for a (very minor) performance increase you could go with

return strpos($url, '?') !== false;

Over 1,000,000 iterations the average time for strpos was about 1.6 seconds vs 1.8 for parse_url. That being said, unless your application is checking millions of URLs for query strings I'd go for parse_url.

Napper

Answer 4

Like this:

if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])) {

}

Fairtrade

You'd think. But when I do a test like if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])) { echo 'has string'; } else {echo 'no string';} I get 'has string' for both of the example urls above. – Creekmore

There's always a $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] present, regardless if there was a query string in the url. You have to do if ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] !== '') { echo 'has string' } – Foreside

Answer 5

You can also use if (!$_GET) if you just want to check if the URL doesn't have any parameters at all.

Vo