I have a search form on my site, and I want to pass the text in the form to the URL, like: mysite.com/search.php?q=apples (if search word was apples).
I figure that way people can bookmark their searches.
One solution I thought would be to catch the searchword in search.php and then reload into a new made URL. But it's not very elegant to reload like that. So how can I do it - I mean, how is it normally done? Do I need to use jQuery?
Clarification: I know how to get the vars from the URL in php. What I need is to control the URL that will be opened when the user presses SUBMIT, and the URL needs to contain the user's search word! Just like Google or DuckDuckGo, I put "apples" and the URL becomes ...?q=apples. But - how?! (Then I'll pick that up in the search.php, of course, but I know how to do that.) This is what I have now:
<div id="topnav">
<form action="search.php" method="post">
<input name="searchword" type="text">
<input type="submit">
</form>
Thank you so much.
Upon reading the clarification. What you need is a search form that submits to your search.php for example:
<form action="search.php" method="get">
<input type="text" value="search word" name="q" />
<input type="submit" value="submit" />
</form>
This will pass whatever value entered in the input named q to the search.php script.
If you post a HTML form which includes a text field with name 'q' and value 'apples' then the URL you want is automatically created by the browser. You definitely don't need JQuery for that.
So the form action would be search.php, the field would be called q and the method would be Get?
You should be able to handle all this from the html form if I'm understanding what it is you're trying to achieve.
if you have a form then must have declared form methoed POST/GET
in you search.php you can simply do this $_POST['name of the input field'] to get the word string,
and if you want to pass variable in url then you need to make a link through <a href="you URL">Link </a>
how about using the POST-Redirect-GET pattern? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post/Redirect/Get] also http://blog.andreloker.de/post/2008/06/Post-Redirect-Get.aspx
This would allow you to keep the url in the browser:
yoursite.com/search.php?q=apples
Alternatively, you can use javascript to set the location.hash of the url in the browser w/ the query information after the postback; I suspect this is actually what Google does.
eg,
yoursite.com/search.php#apples