Query Strings, how do you do it? Options

[Mikeplyts]

I was wondering how you could make those url's that have a question mark and a few equal signs and such at the end of a url. I belive they are called query strings, right? How can I do it to like make a page go to a next page such as this where it has "?page=2". I know it has to something with PHP and I tried googling tutorials but I just don't understand. Can someone please explain how to do this like if I wanted to make the page go the second page using a simple HTML "a" tag? Thanks.

[mipadi]

No, the script that gets run would be whatever's in the path, e.g., page.php in the above example. So page.php?page=1 and page.php?page=99 are all handled by page.php, which would contain the logic for working with the query string values.

My personal website uses a page parameter in the query string to handle paging, as seen here. It's written in Python, so it may not help you understand, but here's the snippet of code I use to handle page numbers:

CODE

def get_page(request):
    try:
        # Grabs the page from the query string
        page = int(request.GET['page'])
    except ValueError:
        raise PageError
    except KeyError:
        # If there's no ?page attribute, we want to
        # show the first page of results
        page = 1
    
    if page < 1:
        raise PageError
    return page


def index(request):
    try:
        page = get_page(request)
        return render_to_response("blog/paged.html", get_posts(page))
    except PageError:
        return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('blog'))