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Author purpose of /? at the end of a link
Brent Clark

2006-02-17, 3:55 am

Hi all

I came across a link where there was just a ? at the end of the link.

e.g.
http://www.gmx.net/?

Is there a particular reason or purpose for this.

Just something I was wondering.

Kind Regards
Brent Clark
usenet@DavidFilmer.com

2006-02-17, 3:55 am

Brent Clark wrote:
> I came across a link where there was just a ? at the end of the link.


That is used to pass parameters, ie:

http://www.whatever.com/?userid=fred

An empty ? at the end does nothing (but it doesn't harm anything).

Did you also have a Perl question to ask in this Perl newsgroup?

--
http://DavidFilmer.com

Octavian Rasnita

2006-02-17, 3:55 am

From: "Brent Clark" <bclark@eccotours.co.za>


> Hi all>
> I came across a link where there was just a ? at the end of the link.
>
> e.g.
> http://www.gmx.net/?
>
> Is there a particular reason or purpose for this.
>
> Just something I was wondering.
>


"/" is the name of the root directory and the request made to the server is
something like:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.site.com

Something should be specified after the name of the host, because otherwise
nothing is requested.

Teddy

Peter Cornelius

2006-02-17, 6:56 pm

The slash is the beginning of the file portion of the request, in
this case it's asking for the web root default which is usually
index.html but can be specified through server configuration.

The '?' signals the beginning of the GET parameter list, which is
empty in this case. If you do a google search you should see a more
complete list of GET parameters in the url:

http://www.google.com/search?q=what+does+%27%3F%27
+mean&sourceid=mozilla-search

the '?' signals the beginning of 'name=value' pairs which are
separated by the '&' symbol. The '%27' types of things are encoded
special characters. The ? is %3F and the ' is %27. Since these are
special symbols in the URL they have to be translated into these codes.

PC

On Feb 16, 2006, at 10:57 PM, Brent Clark wrote:

> Hi all
>
> I came across a link where there was just a ? at the end of the link.
>
> e.g.
> http://www.gmx.net/?
>
> Is there a particular reason or purpose for this.
>
> Just something I was wondering.
>
> Kind Regards
> Brent Clark
>
> --
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> For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-help@perl.org
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