High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In World Wide Web, a query string is the part of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that contains data to be passed to web applications such as CGI programs. When a web page is requested via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the server locates a file in its file system based on the requested URL. This file may be a regular file or a program. In the second case, the server may (depending on its configuration) run the program, sending its output as the required page. The query string is a part of the URL which is passed to the program. Its use permits data to be passed from the HTTP client (often a web browser) to the program which generates the web page. When a server receives a request for such a page, it runs a program (if configured to do so), passing the query_string unchanged to the program. The question mark is used as a separator and is not part of the query string.