[SOLVED] Asterix in url

[Guest]

I use google for everything but for once i looked at yahoo and noticed the weird query string

 

http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geu6cu0V5IYH4A9exXNyoA/SIG=13h6b7nnh/EXP=1214259886/**http%3a//search.yahoo.com/search%3fei=UTF-8%26fr=yfp-t-501%26p=speed%2btest%26rs=1%26fr2=rs-top

 

This doesn't make any since at all there is two urls?

 

From what I can tell its just using the second one but what is the reasoning for this and is there any documentation about how it works.

[lonewolf217]

it looks like some sort of redirection being done by yahoo.

 

did you get this link directly from the yahoo search page or something ?

[Guest]

Yea I got it directly from yahoo. I am making a script that uses regex and saw this and through a wrench into the works im just trying to learn what other surprises there could be.

[lonewolf217]

I cannot tell you exactly what the asterix does, but this is the kind of link you get when you click on a search result from a search engine like yahoo or google.  some kind of redirection they do so the site knows what search engine got them there I suppose

[haku]

They could very well be using it as a separator that can easily be found using regex. If they have two pieces of data they want to store in one variable for whatever reason, they can split it up using

 

$variable = explode("**", URL)

 

(using PHP). In this case they would end up with an array that holds whatever is on the left of the asterixes in the first key, and whatever is on the right of the asterixes in the second key.

 

Or they could use it with the http:// for regex:

 

if(ereg("**http://", URL))
{
   echo "found";
}

 

I have no idea if either of these are what they are doing though. Just speculation on a couple possibilities.