 <p>You are just passing that function a string. For it to make any sense of that, it would have to parse the string to split up the key/value pairs. I'm not saying it's the best approach, but if you want to do that, you should use <a href="http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-str.php" rel="nofollow"><code>parse_str()</code></a>.</p> <p>Note that this is <em>not</em> by any means a language feature of PHP, but I am just providing a means to handle what you've shown.</p>