How to parse GET tokens from URL with regular expression - regex

Question

Given a URL with GET arguments such as
http://www.domain.com?key1=value1+value2+value3&key2=value4+value5
I wish to capture all the values for a given key (into separate references if possible). For example if the desired key was key1 i would want to capture value1 in \1 (or $1 depending on language), value2 in \2, and value3 in \3.
My flawed regex is:
/[?&](?:key1)=((?:[^+&]+[+&$])+)/
which yields 0 results.
I am writing this in c++ using ECMA syntax, but I think I could convert a solution or advice from any regex flavor to ECMA. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This has been answered before and there are compact scripts written for it.
Regular expressions are not optimal for extracting query string values. At the end of this answer, I will give you an expression which can extract the value(s) for a given field into separate references. But not that it takes a "lot" of time to extract the parameters one at a time using regular expressions, but they can all be completely extracted very quickly with no regular expression engine needed. For instance, http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/javascript/article.php/3755006/How-to-Use-a-JavaScript-Query-String-Parser.htm
What language are you trying to use to extract these parameters, C++?
If you are using, JavaScript, you use the small functions mentioned in the article above, i.e.,
function ptq(q)
{
/* parse the query */
var x = q.replace(/;/g, '&').split('&'), i, name, t;
/* q changes from string version of query to object */
for (q={}, i=0; i<x.length; i++)
{
t = x[i].split('=', 2);
name = unescape(t[0]);
if (!q[name])
q[name] = [];
if (t.length > 1)
{
q[name][q[name].length] = unescape(t[1]);
}
/* next two lines are nonstandard, allowing programmer-friendly Boolean parameters */
else
q[name][q[name].length] = true;
}
return q;
}
function param() {
return ptq(location.search.substring(1).replace(/+/g, ' '));
}
Once you have that code included in your page's scripts, then you can parse the current URLs data by doing query = param(); and then using the value of query.key1, etc.
You can parse other query-string formatted data by using the ptq() function directly, i.e., query_object = ptq(query_string).
If you are using another language and regular expressions are the way you want to do it, then this would return all values matching key1, for instance:
/key1=([^&;]*)/g
That will return all the values with a certain field name (which in the query string definition, are written like this, key1=value1&key1=value2&key1=value3, etc.).
The way you ask your question makes it sound like you want to create your own programmer-friendly way of supplying values (i.e., by constructing your own custom URLs rather than receiving data from form submissions through browsers) in which your values are separated by spaces (spaces are encoded as + signs in an HTTP GET query string, and as %20 in generic query strings).
You could make a complicated regular expression to do this in one step, but it is faster to match the entire field (all the values and the + signs as well), and then split the result at the + signs.
For each of the results from the regular expression I indicate, you can extract the plus-sign separated values by simply doing /[^+]*/g