Detect if a page have been called via .htaccess RewriteRule in PHP

Question

Hi,

I am using .htaccess RewriteRule on a website I'm working on.

Here is a sample of my .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^about.htm$ /index.php?load=about&output=html [NC]

I would like to know if there is a way in my index.php file to detect if the page have been called via a Rewrite or the user reached it directly. I'm trying to avoid having to write some security check that I am not even sure where to start.

If there is no way to make that "check" where should I start to secure the file ?

My guess would be to make sure only load and output are passed to the $_GET, make a strip_tags(), trim(), stripslashes() and remove quotes.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can check the request uri, which is contained in the $_SERVER global variable.

Answer 2

Look for REDIRECT_URL or REDIRECT_STATUS in the $_SERVER global. mod_rewrite should be adding these.