Passing variable through .htaccess

Server Config
1

Hi,

Finding my way around .htaccess and in particular with mod rewrite. However, need some advice as to how to achieve my url to appear like this:

http://www,mysite.com/category-brand-product.html

by passing variables. I can get this to work but I have to use the variable values within the re-written url, like so:

http://www.mysite.com/cheese-b-1-p-2.html
where b represents brand and p represents product. I need to pass the values through to the next page and retrieve them using $_GET.

Ideally, I would like to have the url as such;
http://www.mysite.com/cheese-edam-block-of-cheese.html

Is this possible and if so, what’s the best way to go about this. Can you hide the values past through the URL?

An example of my rewrites:


RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9/-]+)-b-([0-9]+)-p-([a-z0-9/-]+).html$ product.php?&brand=$1&prod=$2

Cheers

2

You can’t do this using just the .htaccess, you need to change your code as well.
What you’re after is a thing called slugs, see for an example tutorial here: how to use generated slug (using .htaccess) | TechnoReaders.com

3

freaky,

IMHO, you’ve not got your head around your problem, i.e., category-brand-product does not translate to cheese-b-1-p-2 nor to cheese-edam-block-of-cheese. Without an ability to “map” your category, brand and product to the URI (and from the URI to the database in the target file), you will fail with any mod_rewrite attempt. Think: SPECIFICITY!

cheese - either provide a list of acceptable cheese types or require your “cheese” variable to be a test string of lowercase characters (NO -'s, no CAPS, nada!). Use ([a-z]+)- where the last - is the demarker character to separate the cheese from the brand.

brand - easier to specify the few acceptable brands (i.e., (Kraft|Borden|generic)- ).

product - could be either of the above - just be sure to eliminate the spaces or you’ll end up with %20 in their place!

Once you’ve got “specificity” like that, it’s easy to write the mod_rewrite code.

Regards,

DK

4

Thanks for the help and advice guys. looking into it more now