Quotes vs No Quotes

cap97

I always thought as long as you were passing numerical values to a URL, you didn't need quotes around the variable. Yet, doing this URL didn't work:

http://www.livinglegend.org/CAP2/news.php?month=1&year=2003

while quoting it did:

http://www.livinglegend.org/CAP2/news.php?month="1"&year="2003"

The weird thing is that the first URL (sans quotes) seems to work fine as long as month or year doesn't equal 1. (Put a 2 there instead, and it works fine.) So what's with the number 1 that makes it screw up my web site?

sglane

I"m not quite sure what you're trying to do, but all that stuff should get urlencode() 'd and urldecode()'d during the http transaction. You don't need to quote strings, numerical or any other variable type for use in the URL. When you put the quotes are you using the " or are you using %22? %22 is the urlencode()'d version of the literal ". When you put the " in the url, php turns the value into a string since there is non-numeric data in the value (the quotes are non-numeric).... Hope this helps.

cap97

I"m not quite sure what you're trying to do, but all that stuff should get urlencode() 'd and urldecode()'d during the http transaction.

Uh...what does that mean?

You don't need to quote strings, numerical or any other variable type for use in the URL.

Really? I'm going from a list of Months/Years to a list of news articles for the month and year clicked on. Wouldn't I need to link the list with URL variables in order to get a specific query?

cap97

Okay I figured something out. Not sure what, but here goes.

I originally did this:


<?php

 if ( $month & $year )
 {
   echo "The month is $month for the year of $year"
 }
 else
 {
  echo "Booooo"
 }

?>

This worked so long as neither $month nor $year was equal to 1. However, upon doing this instead:


<?php

 if ( $month && $year )
 {
   echo "The month is $month for the year of $year"
 }
 else
 {
  echo "Booooo"
 }

?>

...all works well. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but what's the significance of "&&" over just "&"?

sglane

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.bitwise.php

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.logical.php

Basically, one is for bitwise and other is "and". URLEncoding is a way for special characters like quotes, spaces, percent signs, etc to be temporarily encoded so the browser and web server can handle the reserved characters.

http://www.com/index.php?var=?
that would break because there are 2 question marks. or :

http://www.com/index.php?var=&
that would break because it's expecting another variable after the ampersand.