Mysql function to get querystring parameter of url

Not suprisingly, most google results only returned things for doing this within some kind of PHP application.  Probably because nobody belives in MySQL as a data warehouse, or a place to parse strings… In the do with what you have environment of a startup, I do not have that luxury.  This function so far works decent, it’s not extremely robust, but it does a job.

CREATE FUNCTION `fn_getparam`(param varchar(55), url varchar(2048)) RETURNS varchar(2048) CHARSET latin1 COLLATE latin1_general_cs
BEGIN

declare val varchar(2048);
declare _param varchar(60) DEFAULT CONCAT(param,'=');

select
case
	when locate(concat('&',_param), url) > 0
		then right(url, length(url) - (locate(concat('&',_param),url)+length(concat('&',_param))-1))
	when locate(concat('?',_param), url) > 0
		then right(url, length(url) - (locate(concat('?',_param),url)+length(concat('?',_param))-1))
	when locate(concat('#',_param), url) > 0
		then right(url, length(url) - (locate(concat('#',_param),url)+length(concat('#',_param))-1))
	when locate(_param,url) > 0
		then right(url, length(url) - (locate(_param,url)+length(_param)-1) )
else null
end
into val;

set val = replace(replace(left(val, locate('&',concat(val,'&'))-1),'%20',' '),'+',' ');

RETURN val;
END