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?
![Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass]()
I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...
![Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer]()
Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...
![PHP IMDB Scraper]()
It's been quite a while since I've written a PHP grabber and the itch finally got to me. This time the victim is the International Movie Database, otherwise known as IMDB. IMDB has info on every movie ever made (or so it seems). Their...
![Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis]()
Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...
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″