PHP and htaccess redirection: Rewriting yoursite.com/user.php?username=xyz to yoursite.com/xyz

Question

Hi, let's say I want to use .htaccess to rewrite the following.

Rewriting /user.php?username=xyz to /xyz.

I would use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ user.php?username=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ user.php?username=$1

The problem is once this is done, how do I access the username in my other links?

so /mike/details.php

How do I get the value of username ('mike') to automatically be added to the URL so it's like: /username/details.php?username=mike

What would I need to change in .htaccess to get this value? Or do I have to do it in the PHP script to parse the URL?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think passing the username as a query string parameter is not a good solution.

So, make the user data to be stored in the session (server side) and let the session mechanism retrieve it by means of session ID (passed through cookies or GET, it doesn't matter)

Your rewrite rule can still redirect to user.php setting the username parameter, but then user.php will store the user name and its data in the session ... from now every other php script that access the $_SESSION container (invoking session_start()) can easily retrieve every user related data it needs

My 2 cents :)

Answer 2

This will overlap with other rules in the site with starts with anytext like say ^abc

Answer 3

try this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ user.php?username=$1 [L,QSA]