Using slashes in drupal path parameters

Question

I'm working on my first module. I'm setting up hook_menu() to register several URLs. Some of the parameters may be raw strings with slashes in them. For example, "Round 1 / Heat 1" as one parameter. Now, I know that I can make my javascript encode the slashes when constructing the URL, but it makes me wonder if I'm Doing It Wrong™.

It feel natural to me to be able to use GET params, but I don't see any way to access those in menu callbacks.

Am I doing It wrong with these URL-based parameters?
Is it possible to just POST these parameters, and access them in menu callbacks?

Answer 1

There's one additional trick additionally to the options that you already listed. If you look at search_menu(), you can see that it uses a named placeholder called %menu_tail and this: 'load arguments' => array('%map', '%index'),.

This does exactly what the name suggests. It calls menu_tail_load() (and passed it's own index/position to it as a load argument), which doesn't actually load anything but takes all additional path elements including it's own position, and returns them as a single argument.

Obviously, this only works for the last argument. If you have multiple arguments like this, use GET/POST variables or escape them.

Answer 2

You could access the parameters in hook_menu(). Try the following code.

function menufun_menu() {
  $items['menufun/%/bar/baz'] = array(
    'title' => 'Hi',
    'page callback' => 'menufun_hello',
    'page arguments' => array(1), // The matched wildcard.
    'access callback' => TRUE,
  );

  return $items;
}

/*
 * Page callback.
 */
function menufun_hello($a = NULL) {
  return t('Hello. $a is @a', array('@a' => $a));
}