Hiding part of the url in Zend Framework - php

Question

I was thinking if there is a way to hide part of the url in PHP/ Zend Framework 2. Something like this:
sitename.com/something/?inviter=1234&id=1
But I'd like to hide the part with the &id=1 somehow, so that when the url is copied and entered by the user, it would look like this:
sitename.com/something/?inviter=1234
And on the other side I can do something like this:
$id = $_GET["id"])
Is this possible to do, if so, how? Maybe there is something close to what I'm looking for to achieve?

Answer 1

You can hide it only with Cookie or Session techniques. But it will work only for one user during one session.

Answer 2

You can parse and rebuild the url using parse_url, http_build_url, with parse_str, and http_build_str.
For example:
/**
* Transform a url using a whitelist of query-string keys
*/
function transformUrlKeepQueryKeys($url, array $whitelist)
{
// Break the given url into parts
$parts = parse_url($url);
// Break the parts into key-value pairs
$query = $parts['query'];
parse_str($query, $queryParts);
// Unset all unwanted keys
foreach (array_keys($queryParts) as $k) {
if (!in_array($k, $whitelist)) {
unset($queryParts[$k]);
}
}
// rebuild the url
$parts['query'] = http_build_query($queryParts);
// return
return http_build_url('', $parts);
}
Invocation should be:
$url = 'http://sitename.com/something/?inviter=1234&id=1';
$whitelist = [
'inviter'
];
$expectedUrl = 'http://sitename.com/something/?inviter=1234';
$actualUrl = transformUrlKeepQueryKeys($url, $whitelist);
assert($expectedUrl == $actualUrl);
Alternatively, you could implement something similar using a blacklist of keys to remove.
The only problem with this is that the function http_build_url is not included in core PHP, but is part of the PECL HTTP extension. If you are unable to install that extension in your environment, then you can use a pure PHP implementation of that function, for example here.