How to create friendly URL in php?

user_87473 0
Viewed 131689

Normally, the practice or very old way of displaying some profile page is like this:

www.domain.com/profile.php?u=12345

where u=12345 is the user id.

In recent years, I found some website with very nice urls like:

www.domain.com/profile/12345

How do I do this in PHP?

Just as a wild guess, is it something to do with the .htaccess file? Can you give me more tips or some sample code on how to write the .htaccess file?

friendly-url url php
8 Answers

According to this article, you want a mod_rewrite (placed in an .htaccess file) rule that looks something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/news/([0-9]+)\.html /news.php?news_id=$1

And this maps requests from

/news.php?news_id=63

to

/news/63.html

Another possibility is doing it with forcetype, which forces anything down a particular path to use php to eval the content. So, in your .htaccess file, put the following:

<Files news>
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

And then the index.php can take action based on the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable:

<?php
    echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
    // outputs '/63.html'
?>
altCognito_389710

I recently used the following in an application that is working well for my needs.

.htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# enable rewrite engine
RewriteEngine On

# if requested url does not exist pass it as path info to index.php
RewriteRule ^$ index.php?/ [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?/$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

index.php

foreach (explode ("/", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) as $part)
{
    // Figure out what you want to do with the URL parts.
}
user_275360

It's actually not PHP, it's apache using mod_rewrite. What happens is the person requests the link, www.example.com/profile/12345 and then apache chops it up using a rewrite rule making it look like this, www.example.com/profile.php?u=12345, to the server. You can find more here: Rewrite Guide

user_313180

ModRewrite is not the only answer. You could also use Options +MultiViews in .htaccess and then check $_SERVER REQUEST_URI to find everything that is in URL.

user_490480

There are lots of different ways to do this. One way is to use the RewriteRule techniques mentioned earlier to mask query string values.

One of the ways I really like is if you use the front controller pattern, you can also use urls like http://yoursite.com/index.php/path/to/your/page/here and parse the value of $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].

You can easily extract the /path/to/your/page/here bit with the following bit of code:

$route = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], strlen($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']));

From there, you can parse it however you please, but for pete's sake make sure you sanitise it ;)

user_150040
user_619800
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