PHP switch with GET request

Question

I am building a simple admin area for my site and I want the URLs to look somewhat like this:

http://mysite.com/admin/?home
http://mysite.com/admin/?settings
htt         


        

Answer 1

Use $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] – that contains the bits after the ?:

switch($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) {
    case 'home':
        echo 'admin home';
        break;
}

You can take this method even further and have URLs like this:

http://mysite.com/admin/?users/user/16/

Just use explode() to split the query string into segments, get the first one and pass the rest as arguments for the method:

$args = explode('/', rtrim($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], '/'));
$method = array_shift($args);

switch($method) {
    case 'users':
        $user_id = $args[2];

        doSomething($user_id);
        break;
}

This method is popular in many frameworks that employ the MVC pattern. An additional step to get rid of the ? altogether is to use mod_rewrite on Apache servers, but I think that's a bit out of scope for this question.