Friendly URLs

PHP
1

Hi,

Is there a way in PHP that I can make the URLs more friendly without the PHP extension?

2

You will need to use mod_rewrite (which is an Apache extension, not a PHP extension).

There’s also the option of using PATH_INFO, but I don’t know much about that variant.

Without either of those two options, the best you could do is to use your site’s folder structure to empart semantic meaning to your URLs.

3

As immerse said, the best way is mod_rewrite on apache servers.

Chances are it will probably already be enabled, and you can put a .htaccess file into your document root. In this you can define rules for your pages.

For example
site.com/contact
points to
site.com/contact.php

There’s actually a blog on sitepoint about it
mod_rewrite: A Beginner’s Guide to URL Rewriting Article » SitePoint

4

Here is a clip of the htaccess I use on my site…


Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^example/([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?doc=$1 [L]

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?num=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z_]+)/?$ index.php?letters=$1 [L]

should grab url.com/213/ and the server would see it as index.php?num=213
vs url.com/abc/ the server would see as index.php?letters=abc

and if someone was to visit url.com/23bae or something random it should be picked up by the 404 page.

vs url.com/example/this would become index.php?doc=example

I haven’t worked with htaccess for a while, but this was what I came up with last time I meddled with it… If anything is wrong maybe someone else can clarify.