I am new to PHP.
I have a page that displays user profile. I need to pass user id to this page so that correct profile was displayed.
I just dont use the <form> element. I want to have a link
<a href="/users/24378234298734"> or <a href="/users/?id=24378234298734">
or whatever
Since I am not using form I cannot use _GET or _POST on the handler page What is the best way to handle the parameters on handler page?
A form with method="GET" is just a way to build a query string automatically based on user input. Nothing prevents you using $_GET to read data from a manually constructed query string (and the server can't tell the difference anyway).
<a href="/users/?id=24378234298734"> will cause $_GET['id'] to be populated.
If you have a link somewhere like
<a href="/users.php?id=24378234298734">User XY</a>
and you put this code on users.php:
echo 'Hello '.$_REQUEST['id']; // $_REQUEST catches $_GET and $_POST
you will be able to set up a user page for user number 24378234298734.
Use this..
HTML
<a href="/users/?id=24378234298734">Link</a>
PHP
$id = $_REQUEST['id'];
$_REQUEST is best avoided.You can use $_GET['id'] to retrieve the value in the url /users/?id=324332. No forms are required to receive _GET variables.
?id=24378234298734is a _GET.