How to create friendly URL in php?

Question

Normally, the practice or very old way of displaying some profile page is like this:

www.domain.com/profile.php?u=12345

where u=12345 is the user id.

In recent years, I found some website with very nice urls like:

www.domain.com/profile/12345

How do I do this in PHP?

Just as a wild guess, is it something to do with the .htaccess file? Can you give me more tips or some sample code on how to write the .htaccess file?

Answer 1

According to this article, you want a mod_rewrite (placed in an .htaccess file) rule that looks something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/news/([0-9]+)\.html /news.php?news_id=$1

And this maps requests from

/news.php?news_id=63

to

/news/63.html

Another possibility is doing it with forcetype, which forces anything down a particular path to use php to eval the content. So, in your .htaccess file, put the following:

<Files news>
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

And then the index.php can take action based on the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable:

<?php
    echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
    // outputs '/63.html'
?>