PHP 5/MySQL Programming- P13:computer programming has often been seen as a difficult and arcane skill. Programming languages are difficult and complicated, out of the typical person’s reach. However, the advent of the World Wide Web has changed that to some extent. It’s reasonably easy to build and post a Web page for the entire world to see. The language of the Web is reasonably simple, and numerous applications are available to assist in the preparation of static pages | 38 PHP 5 MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner Run the page again. It works the same as before but the URL of the resulting page looks like this presuming you said the user s name is Andy http phab ph02 userName Andy The get method stashes all the form information into the URL using a special code. If you go back to the whatsName page and put in Andy Harris you get a slightly different result http phab ph02 userName Andy Harris The space between Andy and Harris was converted to a plus sign because space characters cause a lot of confusion. When form data is transmitted it often undergoes a number of similar transformations. All the translation is automatic in PHP programming so you don t have to worry about it. Using a URL to Embed Form Data If you understand how embedded data in a URL works you can use a similar technique to harness any server-side program on the Internet presuming it s set up to take get method data . When I examined the URLs of Google searches I could see my search data in a field named q for query I suppose . I took a gamble that all the other fields would have default values and wrote a hyperlink that incorporates a query. My link looked like this li a href http search q php Google search for php a li Whenever the user clicks this link it sets up a get method query to Google s search program. The result is a nifty Google search. One fun thing you might want to do is figure out how to set up canned versions of your most common queries in various search engines so you can get updated results with one click. Figure illustrates what happens when the user clicks the Google search for php link in the linkDemo page. Figure shows the results of this slightly more complex search. li a href http search q programming for the absolute beginner Google search for programming absolute beginner a li This approach has a down side. The program owner can change the program .
