Get previously visited page ID

Question

I would like to get the ID (or permalink) of the page the visitor visited just before visiting the current page - in other words the ID of the last page in the browser history.

Can this be done? Any idea how to do it?

Answer 1

Break this down into two parts:

First, we create a variable that stores that last-visited page URL, like this:

$prev_url = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] : '';

Then, you could either use substr and strpos to trim down everything between ?= and the / after the ID number. like this:

$prev_url = 'http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123';
$id_block = substr($prev_url, strpos($prev_url, "?p=")+1);
$id = substr($id_block, 0, strpos($id_block, "/"));

.. Or, you could use jQuery/Javascript to achieve the same.

I haven't tested this but it should work - let me know how it does! Good luck ;)