How to pass multiple values of a variable through a URL

Question

I've an application that I'm building, and I'm stuck at a certain point.

I'm trying to pass a variable that has multiple values. So my URL will look like:

localhost/report.php?variable=value1, value2, value3

Problem is I'm not sure how I can do this. The variables are to be used to retrieve data from a database. I'm using PHP and no Javascript.

Any help would be great!

EDIT:
Here is the HTML I have in my page where the variables are selected:

<select name="types" size="19" multiple>
    <option value="all" selected>All Types</option>
    <option value="book" selected>Books</option>
    <option value="cd" selected>CD</option>
</select>

So a user could select Books and CD, and I would need to pass these two values in the "types" variable.

Solution 1

As noted at https://stackoverflow.com/a/2407401/1265817, you can use this method.

If you want PHP to treat $_GET['select2'] as an array of options just add square brackets to the name of the select element like this: <select name="select2[]" multiple …

Then you can acces the array in your PHP script

<?php
header("Content-Type: text/plain");

foreach ($_GET['select2'] as $selectedOption)
  echo $selectedOption."\n";

Solution 2

Use &

localhost/report.php?variable=value1&val2=value2&val3=value3

Is that what you are after?

Solution 3

There is a simple way to do this in PHP by calling http_build_query() and pass your values as an indexed array. You would do something like:

$value_array = array('types' => array('book', 'cd'));
$query = http_build_query($value_array);

Then generate the url using $query.

Solution 4

try localhost/report.php?variable[]=value1&variable[]=value2 will give you an array in php

Solution 5

I think you have your URL correct

localhost/report.php?variable=value1,value2,value3

Then use PHP to get all of the values on the report.php page

$variable = explode(",", $_GET["variable"]);

// Output
$variable[0] = "value1";
$variable[1] = "value2";
$variable[2] = "value3";

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