Question

How can I access a variable GET variable from PHP if the URL is like this:
http://example.com/somehash

I obviously know how to do it when there is something like this:
http://example.com/f.php?h=somehash

Here I would just take $_GET[“h”], but i don’t know how to do it for the first case…

Answer 1

The answer is that you can’t. At least not without some additional web server configuration. Typically to achieve “clean URL’s” like this in PHP, there is a URL rewrite that is performed in the webserver (mod_rewrite for example on Apache). What this does is silently redirect requests for

http://example.com/somehash

to be handled by a script at

http://example.com/f.php?h=somehash

This allows PHP to populate $_GET as it normally would, while still showing a clean URL in the browser.

You can search StackOverflow or Google for any number of examples of how to do URL rewrite for clean URL’s.