Rails params explained?

As others have pointed out, params values can come from the query string of a GET request, or the form data of a POST request, but there's also a third place they can come from: The path of the URL.

As you might know, Rails uses something called routes to direct requests to their corresponding controller actions. These routes may contain segments that are extracted from the URL and put into params. For example, if you have a route like this:

match 'products/:id', ...

Then a request to a URL like http://example.com/products/42 will set params[:id] to 42.

The params come from the user's browser when they request the page. For an HTTP GET request, which is the most common, the params are encoded in the URL. For example, if a user's browser requested

http://www.example.com/?foo=1&boo=octopus

then params[:foo] would be "1" and params[:boo] would be "octopus".

In HTTP/HTML, the params are really just a series of key-value pairs where the key and the value are strings, but Ruby on Rails has a special syntax for making the params be a hash with hashes inside. For example, if the user's browser requested

http://www.example.com/?vote[item_id]=1&vote[user_id]=2

then params[:vote] would be a hash, params[:vote][:item_id] would be "1" and params[:vote][:user_id] would be "2".

The Ruby on Rails params are the equivalent of the $_REQUEST array in PHP.