How to manually create Friendly URLs? (PHP)

Question

How to manually create Friendly URLs? (PHP) So I have created simple php file which echos requested string. Now it has form echo.php?string=bla+bla+bla&font=times I want to see it like echo/bla+bla+bla/times How to do such thing (not using external libs)?

Answer 1

You will have to use the Rewrite engine which is the mod_rewrite in apache server.

Answer 2

To turn echo.php into echo you'll need to use a rewriting facility for your web server. If you're running Apache, mod_rewrite is king.

For the rest of it, you just need to parse $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] using a regex. You can use mod_rewrite to do this part also, but in case that's not an option, it can be done in straight PHP.

Answer 3

This is typically done with the mod_rewrite Apache extension. In the .htaccess file, you would put something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^echo/(.+?)/(.+)$ echo.php?string=$1&font=$2 [L]

The first line activates mod_rewrite. The second sets up a regular expression to route requests matching that pattern to the PHP file you want.

Answer 4

Have a look at the .htaccess file that is generated in a new Zend Framework project. You can use it without the rest of the framework or use it as an example for your own URL-rewriting method.

Answer 5

An alternative to rewriting the URL through mod_rewrite, just set a php file to be the 404 error handler. That file can analyze the URL and determine how it should be processed.

 $path_parts = explode('/', $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']);
 echo $path_parts[0]. ', '.$path_parts[1].' font';

For performance reasons, you wouldn't want to configure apache to not send certain file types (i.e. gif, jpg, png, etc) to PHP for handling.

While there are a number of different things you can do, as mentioned in the responses, you can't do it without adjusting configurations in the web server.

Answer 6

Similar to the 404 handler idea, with a very simple RewriteRule you can easily move the URL rewriting management to PHP, which might be easier for you:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . rewrite.php [L]

In rewrite.php you have an array of RegEx URL patterns. These can be used to match the current URL (use $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) and hand over parts of the URL to a real file. The parameters can then just be put into the $_GET array and the correct file can be included.

As an example, the array could look like this:

$rules = array(
    array(
        'articles/view/([0-9]+)',
        'articles.php?id=$1'
    ),
    array(
        'articles/delete/([0-9]+)',
        'articles.php?id=$1&action=delete'
    ),
);