What does the '?' mean in some links after .php? Example: http://thisisjustanexamplelink.com/login.php?do=logout I ask this because I'm making a logout link on my site, and I noticed that other websites use this method. Very newbie question, but I didn't see it on the tutorial I'm reading. Thanks in advance!
When you pass variables to your script, you can use the POST or the GET method. Variables posted by the GET method look like ?variable=value, or ?variable1=value1&variable2=value2 The variables posted by the POST method do not appear after the link. In your case, it means that the action to do is "logout". You can find more details here: http://www.php.net/reserved.variables (more exactly: http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.get.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.post.php) You should do yourself a favor and read this: http://www.securereality.com.au/studyinscarlet.txt It's both shocking and useful
Ahh... this makes sense, thanks. I did not notice this because I've only been using POST. Is it good to use POST instead of GET? It seems much cleaner in the URL. I assume it depends on the situation... I'll read that security txt file.
If you use GET, it's obvious which names you use for variables. If you use POST, some pages will not have links that can be bookmarked. For instance: I can bookmark http://mysite.com/index.php?section=tutorials, but if I use POST, the tutorial section will have the same link as the main page, because the POST values are not visible. Another way is to use http://mysite.com/tutorials, and internally to translate this to POST or GET (WordPress does this, for instance)