Request string without GET arguments

Question

Is there a simple way to get the requested file or directory without the GET arguments? For example, if the URL is http://example.com/directory/file.php?paramater=value I would like to return just http://example.com/directory/file.php. I was surprised that there is not a simple index in $_SERVER[]. Did I miss one?

Answer 1

Edit: @T.Todua provided a newer answer to this question using parse_url.

(please upvote that answer so it can be more visible).

Edit2: Someone has been spamming and editing about extracting scheme, so I've added that at the bottom.

parse_url solution

The simplest solution would be:

echo parse_url($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], PHP_URL_PATH);

Parse_url is a built-in php function, who's sole purpose is to extract specific components from a url, including the PATH (everything before the first ?). As such, it is my new "best" solution to this problem.

strtok solution

Stackoverflow: How to remove the querystring and get only the url?

You can use strtok to get string before first occurence of ?

$url=strtok($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],'?');

Performance Note: This problem can also be solved using explode.

• Explode tends to perform better for cases splitting the sring only on a single delimiter.
• Strtok tends to perform better for cases utilizing multiple delimiters.

This application of strtok to return everything in a string before the first instance of a character will perform better than any other method in PHP, though WILL leave the querystring in memory.

An aside about Scheme (http/https) and $_SERVER vars

While OP did not ask about it, I suppose it is worth mentioning: parse_url should be used to extract any specific component from the url, please see the documentation for that function:

parse_url($actual_link, PHP_URL_SCHEME); 

Of note here, is that getting the full URL from a request is not a trivial task, and has many security implications. $_SERVER variables are your friend here, but they're a fickle friend, as apache/nginx configs, php environments, and even clients, can omit or alter these variables. All of this is well out of scope for this question, but it has been thoroughly discussed:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/6768831/1589379

It is important to note that these $_SERVER variables are populated at runtime, by whichever engine is doing the execution (/var/run/php/ or /etc/php/[version]/fpm/). These variables are passed from the OS, to the webserver (apache/nginx) to the php engine, and are modified and amended at each step. The only such variables that can be relied on are REQUEST_URI (because it's required by php), and those listed in RFC 3875 (see: PHP: $_SERVER ) because they are required of webservers.

please note: spaming links to your answers across other questions is not in good taste.