URI variables ain't doin nothin

wee_mad_jimmy

i'm really confused, i've just installed the latest php distribution(4.something) - i haven't used it since 3, so i do feel a bit rusty, but still, this is really doing my head in -

if i were to, say, load a page thusly:

../main.php?animal=cow

and then type:

<?php

echo $_GET["animal"];

or maybe:

echo $_REQUEST["animal"];

in the page, presumably i see "cow" after the php interpreter has done it's thing. only i don't. i don't see anything at all and my page swears it's never HEARD of "animal", so what's up? if anyone can shed some light on this... well i'll stop crying for starters...

philipolson

What version of PHP4? Autoglobals (superglobals) such as $_GET became available in PHP 4.1.0, Consider this code:

print_r($HTTP_GET_VARS);

Or better yet, a simple call to phpinfo().

wee_mad_jimmy

yerm, i've narrowed it down thanks to that last post: the info wasn't "get"ted from a form, so obviously there was no http get info, or the page wasn't in get mode, or whatever. i guess i really should be getting the vars from the query string.

problem is that echoing (or otherwise accessing) the $QUERY_STRING variable, seems to cause the script to time out. $_ENV["QUERY_STRING"] seems to be echoable but i can't parse_str() it (timeout), $QUERY_STRING is plain unusable - either returns empty or (more often) causes a timeout. I'm thinking this is most likely a configuration problem, but i've really got no idea where to start...

Anyone know why it might happen? I can see that the variables are beautifully populated with my values using phpinfo(), but can't access them in the normal course of a script execution...

philipolson

So, phpinfo() works fine but nothing else does? You should NEVER have to rely on the QUERY_STRING, if you do then it's time to recompile PHP :-) You didn't mention a PHP version so I assume over 4.1.0 Also note that QUERY_STRING does not live in $ENV, it lives in $SERVER.