PHP to check if a URL contains a query string

Question

This is an easy one. There seem to be plenty of solutions to determine if a URL contains a specific key or value, but strangely I can't find a solution for determining if URL does or does not have a query at all.

Using PHP, I simply want to check to see if the current URL has a query string. For example: http://abc.com/xyz/?key=value VS. http://abc.com/xyz/.

Answer 1

For any URL as a string:

if (parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY))

http://php.net/parse_url

If it's for the URL of the current request, simply:

if ($_GET)

Answer 2

The easiest way is probably to check to see if the $_GET[] contains anything at all. This can be done with the empty() function as follows:

if(empty($_GET)) {
    //No variables are specified in the URL.
    //Do stuff accordingly
    echo "No variables specified in URL...";
} else {
    //Variables are present. Do stuff:
    echo "Hey! Here are all the variables in the URL!\n";
    print_r($_GET);
}

Answer 3

parse_url seems like the logical choice in most cases. However I can't think of a case where '?' in a URL would not denote the start of a query string so for a (very minor) performance increase you could go with

return strpos($url, '?') !== false;

Over 1,000,000 iterations the average time for strpos was about 1.6 seconds vs 1.8 for parse_url. That being said, unless your application is checking millions of URLs for query strings I'd go for parse_url.

Answer 4

Like this:

if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])) {

}