Friendly URLs without mod_rewrite

Introduction

Obtaining nice-looking, search engine-friendly URLs is not that easy, especially when dealing with dynamic content.
A common way to overcome the problem is to use the Apache mod_rewrite. But for those who haven't that particular web server installed or don't want to mess with it (yes, it's not that strightforward as it sounds), here's the quick alternative!

The problem

So, we have our nice webpage online at http://example.com/index.php?group=projects&name=myproject&page=7, but we're not happy with it: quite awful uh?

We'd prefer something like http://example.com/index.php/projects/myproject/7

A possible solution

Here we go!

<?php // This is index.php in the root directory of your website // REQUEST_URI should work as well $vars= explode ('/', preg_replace ('/^(\/)/', '', $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])); print_r ($vars); ?>

What the above code does

Firstly, we get the current document URL stored in the $_SERVER array. We then remove the index.php token, replacing it with... well, nothing (''). The last step is to explode the string so that the stuff we look for ('projects', 'myproject', '7') is all put into our array $vars

Congrats, you have clean URLs now!

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The GNU General Public License (GPL)

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