A query string is a part of a uniform resource locator (URL) that assigns values to specified parameters. A query string commonly includes fields added to a base URL by a Web browser or other client application, for example as part of an HTML document, choosing the appearance of a page, or jumping to positions in multimedia content. A web server can handle a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request either by reading a file from its file system based on the URL path or by handling the request using logic that is specific to the type of resource. In cases where special logic is invoked, the query string will be available to that logic for use in its processing, along with the path component of the URL. Structure Typical URL containing a query string is as follows: When a server receives a request for such a page, it may run a program, passing the query string, which in this case is name=ferret, unchanged to the program. The question mark is used as a separator, and is not part of the query string. Web frameworks may provide methods for parsing multiple parameters in the query string, separated by some delimiter. In the example URL below, multiple query parameters are separated by the ampersand, "&": The exact structure of the query string is not standardized. Methods used to parse the query string may differ between websites. A link in a web page may have a URL that contains a query string. HTML defines three ways a user agent can generate the query string: an HTML form via the element a server-side image map via the attribute on the element with an construction an indexed search via the now deprecated element Web forms One of the original uses was to contain the content of an HTML form, also known as web form. In particular, when a form containing the fields field1, field2, field3 is submitted, the content of the fields is encoded as a query string as follows: The query string is composed of a series of field-value pairs. Within each pair, the field name and value are separated by an equals sign, "=". The series of pairs is separated by the ampersand, "&" (semicolons ";" are not recommended by the W3C anymore, see below). While there is no definitive standard, most web frameworks allow multiple values to be associated with a single