Retrieve & Get Query String from URL in PHP

The easiest and fastest way to get the value of query string in PHP is through $_GET predefined variables. $_GET contains an associative array of variables passed to the current script via the URL parameters, which are passed through urldecode().

$_GET has the following syntax:

$_GET["name"]

Where name is the name of the variables contained inside query string of URL.

For example, in the URL of https://techjourney.net/?s=searchterms, the following PHP function will print out the “searchterms”.

<?php
   echo htmlspecialchars($_GET["s"]);
?>

DO NOT drop the htmlspecialchars() function to avoid malicious injection attack.

In another scenario, if you have to get the entire query string, uses the $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’] predefined variables instead. For example, for same URL of https://techjourney.net/?s=searchterms, the following code will print “s=searchterms”.

<?php
   echo $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"];
?>

If you want to parse the URL and automatically transform all query parameters into corresponding PHP variables, parse_str() could help. For example, in the URL https://techjournye.net/?topic=search&s=keyword, the following code:

parse_str($_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"]);

Will create variables $topic and $s with values of “search” and “keyword” respectively. The following code will store all variables from query string in an array instead:

parse_str($_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"], $query_array);