defining variables in links within other links

[kigoe]

I've got a rather simple script for links, where all my links point to a single PHP page (I'll call it the link redirection script), which then redirects users to the intended link (definened in the variable [b]link[/b]) and records their passage in a MySQL database, so I can see which links are the most popular. This has, up until this point, worked quite well; the structure is such:

[code]http://mydomain.com/link.php?e=i&link=index.php[/code]

where [b]e[/b] indicates an external or internal link and [b]link[/b] indicates the intended URL (in the above case, relative to the root directory, since its an internal link).

However, I run into problems when I try to specify a link to another PHP page [i]with variables defined in the inteneded URL[/i]. For instace, if I were to link to [b]index.php?foo=bar&user=happy[/b], or something, the link would look like this:

[code]http://mydomain.com/link.php?e=i&link=index.php?foo=bar&user=happy[/code]

PHP then interprets this link as contating more variables for use by the link redirection script, and sends me to the page [b]index.php?foo=bar[/b], leaving out the subsequent [b]&user=happy[/b] or any other variables defined afterward.

Is there any way for me to write this link so that only the [b]e[/b] and [b]link[/b] variables are used by the link redirection script, and the [b]foo[/b] and [b]user[/b] variables are ignored -- until they get to the intended PHP page?

thanks!

-nik

[trq]

A better way would be to store the actual links (addresses) in a database, then just have your links pass an id to your script which loads the url from the database and does the redirect.

[kigoe]

eh - too tedious for me. that requires a) inserting every link I want to use into the database and b) pulling these ids everytime I want to link to something. I could make a page with, say, a short form to add links above and a list of all links and their ids below, for reference, but simply making them and looking them up seems a bit overly tedious.

thanks for the suggestion, though.

[ToonMariner]

what you need to do is replace those characters in the url to be directed to. A browser would recognize as a variable by the &x=y.

So replace & with somthing trivial like || and = with |

so your link would look like this

http://mydomain.com/link.php?e=i&link=index.php?foo|bar||user|happy

Then in your redirection page you can do this....

$find = array(
'/\|\|/',
'/\|/'
);
$rep = array(
'&',
'='
)

$link = pregreplace($find,$rep,$_GET['link']);

This would yield:

$link = 'index.php?foo=bar&user=happy';

you may even want to do similar with the '?' in the link variable....

[HeyRay2]

You make a database call to record that a link was clicked.

How much harder is it to do one more query right below the first and grab that same record, grab the URL and make a [b]header()[/b] call to it.

???

Doesn't sound like that much more work.