passing a string in html

[B Squared]

I'm trying to pass a string from the current html page to one I'm
calling. I've read (in the O'Reilly text) this involves using "?",
but there's no example. For example, given I have a standard href
in my code

<a href="new_page. php" (string_I_want_ to_pass)>

What is the syntax for passing the string? The new page is html
with some php imbedded, and I'll want to use the string I pass
inside the php code, but that might be a separate issue. The main
question is: How to pass a string in an href call?

Thanks in advance.

B Squared
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[David Dorward]

B Squared wrote:

I'm trying to pass a string from the current html page to one I'm
calling. I've read (in the O'Reilly text) this involves using "?",
but there's no example. For example, given I have a standard href
in my code

Section 3.3 of the URL spec describes the format.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html

You'll probably want to Form URL Encode the data since so many libraries
exist for handling data in the format.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/...ml#h-17.13.4.1
--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me .uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Andy Dingley]

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:01:07 -0800, B Squared <nu**@null.co m> wrote:

I'm trying to pass a string from the current html page to one I'm
calling.

This is generally a bad idea. For one thing it's easily hackable by
users editing the URL in transit. There used to be a lovely bug on the
Bloomberg.com site (heavyweight financial news) where you could make
_their_ server generate a story with any title you wished, by passing it
in the URL. Imagine a day-traders' blog entry with a post that
mis-represented a story "MegaPharm announce new drug" with a title "FDA
announce enquiry into two-headed babies"

You don't give us enough to know just what or why you're doing, but this
is clearly a PHP problem rather than a HTML one. Making the string for
the href URL is easy (but remember to encode awkward characters such as
" < > & etc.) Using this string in the target page is almost as
simple, a matter of decoding the URL parameters that any PHP primer
should explain.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

David Dorward wrote:

Section 3.3 of the URL spec describes the format.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html

As a matter of principle at least, RFC 1738 should not be cited as a
reference as regards to generic URL format (which is what we are
discussing here). In that role, it was obsoleted in 1998 (!) by RFC
2396, which in turn was obsoleted a year ago by RFC 3986 (STD 66), which
is available as simple hypertext at
http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.html

[B Squared]

Andy Dingley wrote:

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:01:07 -0800, B Squared <nu**@null.co m> wrote:

I'm trying to pass a string from the current html page to one I'm
calling.

This is generally a bad idea. For one thing it's easily hackable by
users editing the URL in transit. There used to be a lovely bug on the
Bloomberg.com site (heavyweight financial news) where you could make
_their_ server generate a story with any title you wished, by passing it
in the URL. Imagine a day-traders' blog entry with a post that
mis-represented a story "MegaPharm announce new drug" with a title "FDA
announce enquiry into two-headed babies"

Point taken.
You don't give us enough to know just what or why you're doing, but this
is clearly a PHP problem rather than a HTML one. Making the string for
the href URL is easy (but remember to encode awkward characters such as
" < > & etc.) Using this string in the target page is almost as
simple, a matter of decoding the URL parameters that any PHP primer
should explain.

Here's what I'm trying to do.
1) the user clicks on an image on the index page
2) this in turn calls / references a page, and passes an argument (the
string) that is uses to build a page dynamically. The argument is
is used in PHP and MYSQL to build the contents of the dynamic page.
3) So the problem really has two parts, a) passing the argument to the
target page, and extracting it so can be used inside the target
page.

Nothing needs to be passed back. So in programming terms, this is a
pass by value problem, if that analogy helps any.

Thanks in advance for any help.

B Squared