How get a like twitter url

Question

hi ... i would like a simple help... i have a url like this: example.com/profile.php?id= & name=

my .htaccess file like this.

RewriteRule ^profile/(.)/(.) profile.php?id=$1&name=$2

so i have a end url like this: example.com/profile/id/name

i can make example.com/id

but how can i get a url like this:

example.com/name

??

thax

Answer 1

Obviously, your profile.php script is expecting two GET variables, and your desired URL only has one. So you will probably have to change both the script and your database schema.

Answer 2

Your rewrite rule is subtly wrong. Yours will only select a single character in each of the bracketed parts. If you put a * after each dot, it will instead select one or more characters which I think is what you need.

RewriteRule ^profile/(.*)/(.*) profile.php?id=$1&name=$2

Answer 3

If what you're looking for is exactly this:

example.com/name

You will need to change your profile.php to only expect the name variable, and use it to query the database.

I believe previously you had something like:

mysql_query("SELECT * from table where id=$id");

You will need to change it to be

mysql_query("SELECT * from table where name$name");

So you are telling your page to query the user by the name, instead of by the ID.

There's a few drawbacks related to this, as your query won't be as fast as it used to be, as I believe your name column is not the primary key, therefore no indexing.

Twitter uses Rails, so they will be calling it in a slightly different way using something like (onMissingMethod):

get_user_by_username()

Which isn't great either, as it's still querying the database by a string, but has some performance improvements to enable rails to do that.

Your htaccess will then looki like:

RewriteRule ^(.*) profile.php?name=$1

Hope that answers your question

Answer 4

I have the exact same problem but, I'm not using PHP my applications runs on java struts. Since I'm new to struts I don´t know if I could apply this same solution or maybe there is a simpler way. Could you guys give some pointers?

Thanks!!