Change the PHP Query String Variable Separator Using php.ini
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?
![Facebook Open Graph META Tags]()
It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites. Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly. And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website. One...
![5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of]()
My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible. I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out. MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...
![Event Delegation with MooTools]()
Events play a huge role in JavaScript. I can't name one website I've created in the past two years that hasn't used JavaScript event handling on some level. Ask yourself: how often do I inject elements into the DOM and not add an...
![Create Twitter-Style Dropdowns Using MooTools]()
Twitter does some great stuff with JavaScript. What I really appreciate about what they do is that there aren't any epic JS functionalities -- they're all simple touches. One of those simple touches is the "Login" dropdown on their homepage. I've taken...
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','&');pretty useful
Didnt know this one, thx ;)
And how Search engines see on this trick?
@wsr: Search engine sees it as the same — you wouldn’t be penalized by this.
@david: Maybe, but standart is “&” and many SE use this symbol to explode and analyze query string…
I think this will break a 3rd party CMS(like wordpress).
Think SEO
If you really want to display pretty URLs it’s better to use mod_rewrite.
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 ‘;’
To fix the above the first example href=”?i=1&x=2″ should read with &
like so
href=”?i=1&x=2″