PHP & Hash / Fragment Portion of URL

Question

I am trying to find a way to save the hash portion of a url and as a PHP variable. This idea is a bit kooky, but bear with me...

I'd like to extract the "location" fragment from the following URL and save it as a PHP variable.

http://www.example.com/#location

However, discussion at this link indicates that the fragment of a URL is only reachable through JavaScript.

But would it be possible to create a link where the fragment is duplicated in the URL, parsed by PHP, and then removed by mod rewrite? So....

Original url:

http://www.example.com/location/#location

PHP gets location variable thanks to the plain "location" in the URL

Apache then rewrites the link to:

http://www.example.com/#location

I'm curious to know if there is an elegant way to solve this problem.

Solution 1

You'll need to use Javascript to read this. There are a few different options - upon page load, you could use an XmlHTTPRequest (AJAX request) to tell the server what the additional URL parameters were. Alternatley you could check to see if there are additional parameters (also via Javascript), and if you find any, post back to a different URL that has these parameters encoded into the URL itself.

Solution 2

The Fragment is never sent to the server, according to this thread on the Mod_Rewrite forums. So, this might be impossible unless you use AJAX to change the page after the fact.

Another idea would be to have Javascript turn the hash into a $_GET paramater, and then refresh the page.

Comments

[mikey_w]

Thanks for the replies! I know the fragment is never sent to the server. What I'm proposing is a "pseudo fragment" or "double fragment" like example.com/fragment/#fragment The first fragment would be interpreted by PHP, and then removed by mod_rewrite, rendering the URL as example.com/#fragment Maybe this approach makes no sense; I'm not sure if it does, hence my question...

[rpiaggio]

If you want to send the person back to example.com/#fragment, you would send them to example.com/fragement and then PHP could forward them to example.com/#fragement.

[mikey_w]

Great idea to forward the user from "example.com/fragment" to "example.com/#fragment". I will use a cookie to save the fragment, then forward the page to itself. Something like this might work: Example: link: example.com/test.php?fragment=turkey $fragment = $_GET['fragment']; if (isset($fragment)) { setcookie("TestCookie", "TestCookie", time()+3600); header("Location: example.com/test.php/#$fragment"); } // do additional stuff based on cookie

[ekerner]

You would end up with 2 entries in the history stack :( And worse, the first always refers to the second so your back button navigation would be bothersome.

[halfer]

This is true if the fragment is manually supplied to this function, but the problem in relation to the original question is that the fragment part is not sent to the server.