?'s in the Address bar

[Rezznor]

Big time newbie question here, but, how do you make the links point to a specific place when the link itself varies?

Ok, easier way to put it... I'm selecting news bits from a database. Displayed is one of the fields of the table of the DB that is just a Summary. What we want to do is be able to click on the Summary which will open a seperate window with the whole story. I have each news item in the DB ordered by a number field, so each entry has it's own number. That is what I want to pass through the link so the new window that opens up will recieve that number, then connect to the DB, select * from news where number = (number passed), and then display it in its entirety.

Pardon if some of that didn't make sense, I'm not completely sure how to describe it because I don't know that process or function is called. And googling "PHP: passing data through a link" doesn't help me at all. Thanks.

[laserlight]

You are probably talking about passing a name/value pair via the query string.

?name=value&name2=value2

Will produce $GET['name] and $GET['name2'] with values 'value' and 'value2' respectively.

[Rezznor]

So how would I write that in the <a href> line? <a href = "news.php?number=$tablerows[0]> (for each table row listed)?
then on the news.php page..
$newsNumber = $_GET['number']
or something along that line?

[laserlight]

Yes. Of course you should check incoming variables with [man]isset/man or [man]empty/man and validate them, or at least cast them to the required type.

[Rezznor]

Thanks alot. I'll have to try this out when I get back to my place of worship: my home computer.