.htaccess Rewrite Question

Question

I have a number of pages in my site, as one would expect.

For example:

index.php submit.php view.php?id=blah

I want these rewritten like

index/ submit/ view/blah

Whats the best way of doing this?

Answer 1

The ways of handling it through .htaccess Rewrite can generate a bit of a headache. It seems like a basic answer, but unless you're up on your regular expressions, you're going to be lost.

There's a few ways of handling it, however. I'm assuming that you only have index.php, submit.php, and view.php with an id associated.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(index|submit|view)/(\d+)$ /$1.php?id=$2
RewriteRule ^(index|submit|view)/(\d+)$ /$1.php

Here's how it works: You tell .htaccess to turn on the Rewrite Engine. Step 2, you give the site the parameter that tells it how it's done. The parameter in this case reads: At the beginning of the url, after the domain name, check for index, submit, or view. If those exists, it'll look for the id. If both those exists, it will return the value into PHP as /(index, submit, or view)?id=$id.

The second one is in case the ID isn't viable.

This is a simple way of handling it. A more complex way of handling it would be...

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/?(\d+)?$ /$1.php?id=$2

This will load whatever is written in regular alphabetical characters of upper and lower case letters only, use that as the filename, then detects if id is even necessary--it will load without.

You should be sure to include some safeguards on your $_GET lines to return errors if the names are erroneous or doesn't return anything of worth.

You should play around with it, research Regular Expressions over a pot of coffee and something alcoholic (I believe that regexp is the #1 cause of alcoholism in modern programmers, but I could be wrong ;-P ...) til you find a scheme that fits comfortably into your system.

As a side-note, you can have as many RewriteRules as you need, but they always get processed from the top one first. I realize this sounds like common sense, but it's important to know when debugging.