What's the term for the part of the URL after the question mark?

Question

http://www.example.com?foo

What's the term for the foo part of the URL?

Solution 1

It's the query, or sometimes the query string.

To pinch a useful diagram from the URI RFC:

     foo://example.com:8042/over/there?name=ferret#nose
     \_/   \______________/\_________/ \_________/ \__/
      |           |            |            |        |
   scheme     authority       path        query   fragment

Solution 2

It's called the "query string", as you can see on Wikipedia.

Solution 3

The query.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.4

Comments

[Sankalp Kotewar]

In the link mentioned in the question, 'example.com?foo' is it possible to have just foo and no assignment (like 'name=ferret' in your example)? If yes, that what would be foo's work over there?

[Trect]

@SankalpKotewar No, you cannot have that without a assignment. The query should have the form field=value. Check this[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string]

[Boris Verkhovskiy]

@SankalpKotewar the convention is to have your query in this format: ?foo=bar&baz=qux but nothing forces you to do that and the query can pretty much be any text (except it can't contain a #). So yes, it's possible. http://example.com/????? is a valid URL for example.