Change the PHP Query String Variable Separator Using php.ini

By  on  

As you probably know, the default PHP query string variable separator is the "&" character. One annoyance with using the "&" character is that, in order to have valid XHTML syntax, you need to output your &'s as "&". If you'd like to avoid all of that mess, you can simply change the separating character to a semi-colon (;). Here's how:

The PHP

//inside the php.ini file
arg_separator.input = ";"

//example URL:  /page.php?key1=value1;key2=value2;key3=value3

There you go -- one easy step to outputting cleaner URLs. Do any of you use this method?

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using MooTools For Opacity

    Although it's possible to achieve opacity using CSS, the hacks involved aren't pretty. If you're using the MooTools JavaScript library, opacity is as easy as using an element's "set" method. The following MooTools snippet takes every image with the "opacity" class and sets...

  • By
    MooTools History Plugin

    One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads.  Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes?  It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth.  Unfortunately...

Discussion

  1. Personally I set it to & which validates fine.

    and if you don’t have access to the ini file the following works:

    ini_set('arg_separator.output','&');
  2. pretty useful

  3. Didnt know this one, thx ;)

  4. And how Search engines see on this trick?

  5. @wsr: Search engine sees it as the same — you wouldn’t be penalized by this.

  6. @david: Maybe, but standart is “&” and many SE use this symbol to explode and analyze query string…

  7. I think this will break a 3rd party CMS(like wordpress).

  8. Alex

    Think SEO

  9. If you really want to display pretty URLs it’s better to use mod_rewrite.

  10. Keep in mind that XML invalidates the & symbol when it’s located in the href tag.
    To validate your XML you have to supply & EG: href=”?i=1&x=2″
    When using this method the return value in the URI will return as “&”, and if you are using relative URLs in your application navigation, this will invalidate the DOM generated XML in most browsers and stop page load in Google Chrome (Safari).
    Result: href=”/mypage.php?i=1&x=2″

    Returns – EntityRef: expecting ‘;’

  11. To fix the above the first example href=”?i=1&x=2″ should read with &
    like so
    href=”?i=1&x=2″

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!