How to pass an array as a URL parameter?

Question

I would like to pass an array and added to a link on my page as a URL parameter, because later on the server side I need the values from the array. How should I do that?

myArray = ['aaa', 'bbb', 'ccc'];  $('#myLink').attr({"href" : '/myLink?array=' + myArray}); 

I am not sure if that is the proper way of doing this?

Answer 1

You can serialize the JSON:

myArray = ['aaa', 'bbb', 'ccc']; var arrStr = encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(myArray)); $('#myLink').attr({ href: '/myLink?array=' + arrStr }); 

If your parsing (on the next page) is done via JavaScript too, you'll conversely use JSON.parse(). In PHP it would be json_decode().

Answer 2

It should not depend on the server side: By the URI standard specification, all parameters must have one name and should have one value. But there can be several parameters with the same name, which is the right way to serialize an array:

http://server/context?array=aaa&array=bbb&array=ccc&otherparameter=x

You could do it like this:

var s=""; for (var i=0;i< myArray.length;i++) {   s+="&myArray="+myArray[i]; } var url="http://server/context?"+s;