Parsing URL query string [duplicate]

Question

I'm trying to extract data from anchor urls of a webpage i.e. :

require 'simple_html_dom.php';
$html = file_get_html('http://www.example.com');
foreach($html->find('a') as $element) 
{
    $href = $element->href;
    $name = $surname = $id = 0;     
    parse_str($href);
    echo $name;
}

Now, the problem with this is that it doesn't work for some reason. All urls are in the following form:

name=James&surname=Smith&id=2311245

Now, the strange thing is, if I execute

echo $href;

I get the desired output. However, that string won't parse for some reason and also has a length of 43 according to strlen() function. If, however, I pass 'name=James&surname=Smith&id=2311245' as the parse_str() function argument, it works just fine. What could be the problem?

Do you have any example input HTML we can test on? In addition, can you elaborate on "I get the desired output"? Lastly, for safety's sake, never execute parse_str without the second parameter. It's risky to blindly overwrite global variables. — Mr. Llama
– Mr. Llama, Commented Jun 30, 2014 at 22:08
@KyleK Assigning 0 to $name, $surname and $id, what do you think it's doing? — Niet the Dark Absol
– Niet the Dark Absol, Commented Jun 30, 2014 at 22:11

Niet the Dark Absol · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-30 22:11:10Z

3

I'm gonna take a guess that your target page is actually one of the rare pages that correctly encodes & in its links. Example:

<a href="somepage.php?name=James&amp;surname=Smith&amp;id=3211245">

To parse this string, you first need to unescape the &s. You can do this with a simple str_replace if you like.

answered Jun 30, 2014 at 22:11

Niet the Dark Absol

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5 Comments

Mr. Llama Over a year ago

That wouldn't explain why echo $href; allegedly gives the correct output. (Unless OP was mistaken or was viewing the output in a web browser.)

Niet the Dark Absol Over a year ago

@Mr.Llama Your parenthetical "unless" is exactly it ;) Notice the strlen output OP gave?

Mr. Llama Over a year ago

Hah! I totally missed that bit.

Niet the Dark Absol Over a year ago

When you spend too long on StackOverflow, you start being able to see these "invisible" errors ;)

Transcendental Over a year ago

Oh, yes, that explains it xD Thanks a lot ;)

Steve · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-30 22:13:04Z

1

Presuming the links are absolute, you just need the query string. You can use parse_url and use an out parameter with parse_str access an array;

$html = file_get_html('http://www.example.com');
foreach($html->find('a') as $element) 
{
    $href= $element->href;


    $url_components = parse_url($href);
    parse_str($url_components['query'], $out);

    var_dump($out)
}

answered Jun 30, 2014 at 22:13

Steve

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