TIL: comma-separated terms

A good friend of mine emailed me today with a WordPress question:

we have a url like /category/term1/ that we’re using to filter on stuff

If I do get_query_var(‘category’) it will properly return ‘term1’

If we have the url like /category/term1+term2/

get_query_var(‘category’) still only returns ‘term1’… do you have any insight as to why?

Thanks

I didn’t dig into this too deeply, but found the posts returned sort of curious. It returned term1 only if term2 was a valid term. If say you wrote /category/term1+foobar/ and foobar was not a valid term, then no posts were returned. I tested this merely by seeing what the browser returned from my own blog. You’ll notice https://mikeauteri.com/category/code-snippets+wordpress/ will return just posts in the category term code-snippets (wordpress is also a valid term on my blog), however, https://mikeauteri.com/category/code-snippets+foobar/ will return nothing (foobar is NOT a valid term on my blog).

Then, just for the hell of it, I tried using a comma instead of a plus… and it did exactly what my friend was looking to do.

So https://mikeauteri.com/category/code-snippets,wordpress/ will return all posts for both code-snippets AND wordpress. If you add an invalid term (like foobar) it will just be ignored.

Anyway, pretty neat 🙂