Anyone know PHP
 

I've been doing a few little things in PHP over the last week for a particular purpose and i'm confused about one thing

I've got a script that refers to itself when it runs, checking a value ($id) that would have been set if the page/script is beign viewed for the second time

the code to check that is

if ($id) {

blahblabla

}

Which as i thought checked that $id existed (in the url). It doesn't seem to work. If i get $id to check against a certain value i know it will be it works, but clearly the person who told me this was wrong or i've totally missed something.

Any ideas from the crowd?

Newer installs of PHP have a config option (register_globals) off. When it is on, GET, POST, and cookie variables are automagically set. Load foo.php?bar=baz, and $bar will be 'baz' within the script. It was disabled by default to protect people with horribly atrocious coding standards from people sending them bogus value and faking authentication.

Use $_GET['id'].

Also, personally speaking I avoid such shortcuts. C programmers love to write weird conditions that take hours to figure out. That's not so critical when performance is not the major factor. If I have a php script that goes to page two, I write something really bloody obvious like

if ($page2 == "yes")
// --- Page TWO section ----------------

...because even though it takes more effort now, it means I'll be able to figure out what I did a year from now, when I've forgotten the whole project and the client wants me to change the whole thing.

I would be fired if I didn't write clean, well-commented code. I'm in the habit now of writing more comment than code. It's just something you get used to.

I've always had the mindset that if your vars and funcs were well-named, then you wouldn't necessarily need to comment. Then my last perl script came to 1500 lines before completion. Yikes!

That's how I used to be. Unfortunately, they don't stand for that shit here.

If you can't understand it from a non-symbolic disassembly listing, you don't belong in the business, that's what I always say.

I realized this week that I have no idea how to program in Java anymore, I took it my first semester and now couldn't write a line of code without a book.

Okay I'm done crying now.

Thanks skunks, the info dated to php3 (which i was not aware of). It's not anything related to anything authish so faking a var is not an issue, though i'll admit it's sloppy as hell, php is not a language i claim to know at all, i'm just playing around atm.

UT the code is commented etc, i just put the minimum to get the point across.