Can I read the hash portion of the URL on my server-side application (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.)?

Question

Assuming a URL of:

www.example.com/?val=1#part2

PHP can read the request variables val1 using the GET array.

Is the ha

Answer 1

Simple test, accessing http://localhost:8000/hello?foo=bar#this-is-not-sent-to-server

python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()"
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...
localhost - - [02/Jun/2009 12:48:47] code 404, message File not found
localhost - - [02/Jun/2009 12:48:47] "GET /hello?foo=bar HTTP/1.1" 404 -

The server receives the request without the #appendage - anything after the hash tag is simply an anchor lookup on the client.

You can find the anchor name used within the URL via javascript using, as an example:

The parse_url() function in PHP can work if you already have the needed URL string including the fragment (http://codepad.org/BDqjtXix):

Output: fizzbuzz

But I don't think PHP receives the fragment information because it's client-only.