How to correctly pass a parameter with a multiple value to the controller?

Question

Web development

There is a page that displays users, there are several filters right there.
One of the filters that gives me difficulty is the driving category filter.
There are A, B, C, D, etc.
How to pass a category for user selection?
I think it should be an array, so I looked for how to transfer an array to a get and work with an address like
?drivecat[]=a&drivecat[]=b
But how correct is this? Maybe there are other, better ways?
And how do I write a query in this case, if my users and drivecats use a many-to-many relationship?

Answer 1

Using a get request with ?drivecat[]=3&drivecat[]=4, by trial and error, the following code turned out:

// проверка на наличие в запросе массива drivecats
if ( count($request->drivecats) ) {
  // выбираем id пользователей (для этого создал отдельную модель для связывающей таблицы)
  $users_id = DrivecatUser::whereIn('drivecat_id', $request->drivecats)->pluck('user_id');
  // выбираем пользователей
  $users = User::whereIn('id', $users_id)->get();
} else {
  $users = User::has('drivecats')->get();
}

UPD: I don’t like the get-request of the form ?drivecat[]=3&drivecat[]=4, and it’s inconvenient to work in js, so I changed to ?drivecats=3,4and in the controller I registered the splitting of the string into an array:
$drivecats = explode(',', $request->drivecats);