Question 40114 in PHP Question posted in
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PHP HTTP build query without array notation

For an extern (Django) API we need to pass our GET query data to them as follow:

?products=Product1&products=Product2

So as you can see they use different encoding for arrays than the PHP inbuilt

http_build_query(['Product1', 'Product2']) => ?products[]=Product1&products[]=Product2

Is there a built in PHP way to build query to get the result the Django API expects? Or do I have to write something my self?

Thanks in advance!

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    You can use code below

    $params = ['products'=>['Product1', 'Product2']];
$query_params = http_build_query($params,null, '&');
$query_string = preg_replace('/%5B(?:[0-9]|[1-9][0-9]+)%5D=/', '=', $query_params);
print_r($query_string);

    This will get query string like "products=Product1&products=Product2"

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  2. 0

    That format is not supported natively.

    I think the main reason is that URL parameters are a flat key/value structure, while http_build_query() can serialise arbitrarily nested arrays and objects. To support that, you need some convention to handle data trees in a flat list. URL specs don’t provide any. PHP uses the [] notation to mimic arrays elsewhere (e.g. $_GET), so it makes sense to have such convention in the builtin query creation function.

    If you are not going to need nested data, you can easily write your own function:

    function encodeParams(array $data): string
{
    $params = [];
    foreach ($data as $name => $val) {
        if (is_array($val)) {
            foreach ($val as $v) {
                $params[] = sprintf('%s=%s', rawurldecode($name), rawurldecode($v));
            }
        } else {
            $params[] = sprintf('%s=%s', rawurldecode($name), rawurldecode($val));
        }
    }
    return implode('&', $params);
}

$test = [
    'products' => [
        'Product1',
        'Product2',
    ],
    'page' => 123,
    'order' => 'asc'
];

var_dump(http_build_query($test));
var_dump(encodeParams($test));

    string(68) "products%5B0%5D=Product1&products%5B1%5D=Product2&page=123&order=asc"
string(54) "products=Product1&products=Product2&page=123&order=asc"

    If you’ll need nested data after all, you first have to decide what your naming convention would be.

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