Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

recently I found that does not deliver the complete url with query anymore on my server.

Code:

 http://www.example.org/search.php?stichwort=wiki
echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
/search.php

However works in this case.

Code:

 http://www.example.org/search.php?stichwort=wiki
echo $GLOBALS['HTTP_SERVER_VARS']['REQUEST_URI'];
/search.php?stichwort=wiki

On an other server, it was the other way round:
not working and works well...

When googlig a solution for a code to match any case of the described above, I found this little code, which seems to work, but which I do not understand what it is doing:

Maybe some pro can tell if this code should work safely and what exactly it is doing. The syntax is new to me

Think of it as an if-then-else:

Code:

if (isset($GLOBALS['HTTP_SERVER_VARS']) && isset($GLOBALS['HTTP_SERVER_VARS']['REQUEST_URI']))
  $something = $GLOBALS['HTTP_SERVER_VARS']['REQUEST_URI'];
else
  $something = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

There are examples here: Control Structures: If - PHP Manual