Pretty URLs without mod_rewrite, without .htaccess

Question

Without a possibility to access .htaccess I find myself in a creative impasse. There is no mod_rewriting for me. Nevertheless, I want to be able to do the nice stuff like:

http://www.example.com/Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/Title_Of_This_Page

What are my alternatives?

In respond to the answers:

• I'm building with php5
• I don't have access to .htaccess
• http://www.example.com/index.php/Blog/ is a known technique but I don't prefer it. Is shows the php so to say.
• How would I create extensionless PHP-files? Would this do the trick?
• How much would using the custom 404 technique hurt performance?

Answer 1

If the MultiViews option is enabled or you can convince whoever holds the keys to enable it, you can make a script called Blog.php that will be passed requests to example.com/Blog/foo and get '/foo' in the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].

Answer 2

If you've the permissions to set custom error documents for your server you could use this to redirect 404 requests.

E.g. for Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument)

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

In the index.php you then can proceed your request by using data from the $_SERVER array.

Answer 3

A quite simple way is to:

• declare a 404 ErrorDocument (e.g. PHP) in .htaccess
• parse the query using $_SERVER and see if it corresponds to any result
• if so replace the HTTP status 404 with status 200 using header() and include index.php

Answer 4

You can also have urls like

http://domain.com/index.php/Blog/Hello_World

out of the box with PHP5. You can then read the URL parameters using

echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];

Remember to validate/filter the PATH_INFO and all other request variables before using them in your application.

Answer 5

The only way is to use custom 404 page. You have no possibility to interpret extensionless files with PHP interpreter without reconfiguring the web server's MIME-types. But you say that you can't edit even .htaccess, so there's no other way.

Answer 6

If you omit a trailing slash, Apache will serve the first file [alphabetically] which matches that name, regardless of the extension, at least on the 2 servers I have access to.

I don't know how you might use this to solve your problem, but it may be useful at some point.

For example if http://www.somesite.com/abc.html and http://www.somesite.com/abc.php both exist and http://www.somesite.com/abc is requested, http://www.somesite.com/abc.html will be served.

Answer 7

You can write a URI class which parses the user-friendly URL you defined.