Question

I am trying to create short links to my application in codeigniter but I’ve met a kind of a problem when designing my route. The problem is that I want a route which will take a string containing a-Z and numbers and redirect that to a controller called image with the string after. Like this: app.com/randomstring -> app.com/image/randomstring. But when I am trying to do this in the routes config file with a regular expression it disables my application and I am unable to enter “normal” urls with controllers that already exist.

How my route looks like right now (I know it’s probably very wrongly made):

$route['(^[A-Za-z0-9]+$)'] = "image/$1";

Is there any easy way to redirect with that short url without using another fake controller first like this: app.com/i/randomstring -> app.com/image/randomstring

And could you maybe help me improve and tell me what part of my regexp is failing?

Answer 1

As I mentioned in the comments, without a clearly defined spec on what the image urls will be, there’s no comprehensive way to solve this. Even YouTube (related to the library you linked to) uses urls like /watch?v=h8skj3, where “watch” is the trigger.

Using a i/r4nd0m$tring would make this a non-issue, and it’s what I suggest, but I had another idea:

$route['(:any)'] = "image/$1";

// Re-Route all valid controllers
foreach (array('users', 'login', 'blog', 'signup') as $controller)
{
    $route[$controller] = $controller;
    $route[$controller.'/(:any)'] = $controller.'/$1';
}
unset($controller);

You might need the image route last, I’m not 100% sure. This should route everything to image/ except the controllers you define. You could even use glob() or something to scan your controller directory for PHP files to populate the array.

Another way to get one character shorter than i/string could be to use a character trigger, like example.com/*randomstring, but that’s a little silly, i/ is much cleaner and obviously, easier to deploy.