Passing data from URL to page

If I was writing a reply to a Craigslist advertisement, I would say something along the lines of "Hello [Username], thank you for contacting me". Now, I want [Username], to be based off of whatever I type in the URL. Here is what I have so far.

Then wherever I want it to be included, I just write "Hello <?php echo $name; ?>, thank you for contacting me". Now, it works fine, but only when I actually define a name. If I don't, it throws up this error.

Notice: Undefined index: time in C:\WAMP\www\xxx\index.php on line 7

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I really don't know what I'm doing, it took long enough to even find what I was looking for, as I have no idea what the terminology would be. Would anyone be kind enough to help? Also, I structure my URL this way, I assume it's the correct form.

http://www.domain.com/index.php?name=Allie_Albatross

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Now, that's in clear plain view, how might I obfuscate the URL? I suppose encoding the URL is my only option.

Decoded: http://www.domain.com/index.php?name=Allie_Albatross

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Encoded: http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com%2Findex.php%3Fname%3DAllie_Albatross

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It doesn't really hide anything, just makes it more difficult to read. Any suggestions?

The E_NOTICE you are getting is simply because $_GET['name'] does not exist. If you had name= (then nothing) that error would not appear. You can turn off that level of reporting in your .htaccess/local PHP.ini file.

In terms of encoding, there are a few ways you can do it.

More advanced: use cryptography. Function such as:

However, if you are new, you can 'encode' the URL into hex.


Add a % at the beginning, and every 2nd character after that. So "test" is %74%65%73%74 [there should be a proper tool for this, but I don't have the time to find it]

Proof of this:


See that what Googles

The table of characters can be found here: asciitable.com

Hope the helps

I think he can just use the .urlencode in the php to encode it like that.

00CivicEX said:

I think he can just use the .urlencode in the php to encode it like that.

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That and rawurlencode do not encode your general alphanumeric 0x30 - 0x7A ASCII bytes as it would be too pointless and confusing for general use.

and for the problem with the error

basically, this code checks to see if you have something in those $_GET variables, if you defined those variables. If you didn't then the value for $name is reset to none that's the quote quote part. You can use whatever string you want, like a default name, John Doe
all above goes for the $time variable too

glad to help