$_GET and Strings

[k_4f]

Using: Apache, php & mySQL.

 

 

Background Information

 

I have a database "movielibrary" which contains a table "movies" which has information of all the movies that I own. For each movie, I have stored the following fields:

 

"movie_id" (primary key, unique int)

"title" (varchar)

"year" (int)

 

I generated a random 3 digit integer between 1 and 218 (because 218 is the movie_id of my last entry in the movies table). Using this, I can generate a search string to query IMDB (using a different php app, which is not in question and works perfectly) and display the box shot and other information taken from the IMDB web site.

 

The search string that I generate is in the following format:

Example Search String for "King Kong (2005)" = "King+Kong+%282005%29" (without any quotes).

 

The string is generated by querying the mySQL database for the title and year that match the movieID that is the same as the randomly generated 3 digit number and is then stored in $searchString.

 

 

 

The problem:

 

In my program, the function that performs the search from IMDB and then stores the resulting movie information is called as follows:

 

$search = new imdbsearch ();

$search->setsearchname ($_GET['name']);

$results = $search->results ();

 

and then we can display the imdbID, the title and year from imdb in the following way:

 

foreach ($results as $res)

{

echo $res->imdbid();

echo '<br />';

echo $res->title();

echo '<br />';

echo $res->year();

}

 

This will work fine if I run the program by passing a search string value for GET myself in the URL:

 

http://localhost/MovieLibrary/randommovie.php?name=King+Kong+%282005%29

 

However, the way I want to do it is by passing my generated searchString because I don't want to manually have to put it in the URL. So the line that is in Red above is changed to:

 

$search->setsearchname ($searchString);

 

And this doesn't work...

 

What type of object is being passed in $_GET['name'] because it definitely isn't a String because if I try to pass a String to the function that performs the search it won't give me anything back. But when I pass it a $_GET object it works like a charm.

 

I need to pass it my $searchString object which is a String.

 

Any suggestions?

[Ken2k7]

uh... what? I'm lost as to what your problem is.

 

What's $searchString? It's not defined in the code? :S

[k_4f]

ah i mentioned it above. its a String which contains the generated search string which I want to use when calling the setsearchname method instead of using $_GET['name']

 

it is done in the line:

 

$search->setsearchname ($_GET['name']);

 

the program works fine if i manually put in the URL a value for name like:

index.php?name=KingKong

 

put if i put a string value KingKong in $searchString and call the function like this:

 

$search->setsearchname ($searchString);

 

...it wont work.

 

so my question is... what kind of object is $_GET['name'] and how can i convert my String object to be that kind of object.

[Daniel0]

Don't encode it in the variable you create. PHP decodes all the GET variables and therefore you do not have e.g. %20 instead of a space in GET queries.

 

I.e. make $searchString = 'King Kong (2005)'; instead.

 

so my question is... what kind of object is $_GET['name'] and how can i convert my String object to be that kind of object.

Just a regular associative array, not an object (nor is your string an object).

[k_4f]

wow thank you, that worked perfectly

 

to think i spent so many hours going down the wrong path

 

thanks again. much appreciated.