Wp_redirect and sending variables

Question

How to send some variables with wp_redirect() from function.php file in my theme folder?

if ( $post_id ) {
    $variable_to_send = '1';
    wp_redirect( home_url(), $variable_to_send );
    exit;
}

And on homepage I will catch the variable in if-else condition to show some confirmation or not depending if $variable_to_send = '1' or not.

How to do that in WordPress?

Answer 1

I'm afraid that you can't do it this way.

wp_redirect is a fancy way to send header Location and the second argument of this function is request status, and not custom variable. (404, 301, 302, and so on).

You can send some variables as get parameters. So you can do something like this:

if ( $post_id ) {
        $variable_to_send = '1';
        wp_redirect( home_url() .'?my_variable='.$variable_to_send );
        exit;
}

Then you can use these variables as $_GET['my_variable'] or register it as custom get variable.

Answer 2

Late to the party with this one, but the "Wordpress way" to do it would use add_query_arg like so:

if ( $post_id ) {
    wp_redirect( esc_url( add_query_arg( 'variable_to_send', '1', home_url() ) ) );
    exit;
}

This will initiate a redirect to http://my.website/?variable_to_send=1. You'd be able to capture the variable, then, on the homepage (or blog page, depending on how your home_url() is setup) by accessing $_GET['variable_to_send'] in your PHP code.

If you're going to do this in functions.php, make sure to hook onto init or a similarly early hook or else you will get a "Headers already sent" error.

Hopefully this helps someone who stumbles across this post.