one of the many questions plaguing the newbie world 😉. the values that you see are commonly referred to as 'name/value' pairs where 'ID' is the variable name and the value after it is well, its value. its not a terribly short discussion, so i will give you an example. name value pairs are used with databases (like mysql). on my site I have a movie page showing what's playing at what theaters and I provide reviews for each movie. lets say someone is on hte movie page and they click on the movie "Gone With The Wind." In my database I have information about gone with the wind and that database entry has its own ID number so it can be unique from the rest of the movie listings. when someone clicks on gone with the wind movie link it takes them to a page generated on the fly that gives information about that specific movie. in the address bar of the webbrowser you would see "http://www.chapelhillreview.com/entertainment/movies/movie.php?id=20". what you are seeing on that page about the movie is all the information pulled from the database where the ID = 20. so, behind the scenes I have a php script that says "select TIMEPLAYING, MOVIETITLE, REVIEW from moviedatabase WHERE ID = 20."
now that is a good example but may be a bit complicated. You don't have to have a database to use name value pairs. here is a good quick example. create two php pages. one will be called INSERTNAME.PHP and the other will be SHOWNAME.PHP. the first is just a simple form with a text bar to enter your name. name the box value 'MYNAME' or whatever you want. this will be the name of the 'name/value' pair. the action for the insertname.php form will be 'SHOWNAME.php'. now, create showname.php and just write a very simple php script exactly like this:
<?php
echo ("$MYNAME");
?>
when you click the 'SUBMIT' button on the insertname.php page, you will access showname.php and see printed out whatever you put into the box on the form page (ie, your name) now, take a look at the URL address while you are on the showname.php page.. it will look like this:
//showname.php?myname=chris (chris is the variable, so it will be whatever you type into the box)
hope this helps 🙂
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