Question

I am trying to use apache-rewrite rule to convert the below URL:

http://localhost/foo/bar/news.php?id=24

Into this format:

http://localhost/foo/bar/news/foo-bar

The number 24 is an id of a random row from a MySQL table, which also contains title and content fields.

MariaDB [blog]> select * from articles;
+----+---------+----------+ 
| id | title   | content  |
+----+---------+----------+ 
|  1 | foo-bar | bla bla  | 
+----+---------+----------+ 
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I have the following rule inside my .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
^news/([A_Za_z0_9_]+)$ DIRECTORY/AID/news.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]

I also have a php code that generates a link like this:

$link = "<a href='news.php?id={$row['id']}'></a>";
echo $link;  

However, I can’t get the rewrite rule to change the path as the desired end result.

Answer 1

First of all, you would need to change the href in the html, to give the new url format

function news_preview() {
$query = "SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5  ";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)) 
{   
  echo "<a href=\"/news/$row[id]\">  ". substr($row['title'], 0,26)."...</a><br/>".; }
}

The will generate urls like http://localhost/news/24

Note that I removed the /DIRECTORY/AID from the url, as the htaccess suggest you want that to be url, as opposed to what you stated in the text.

But now the get to the http://localhost/news/this_is_article_title type of url. Because there is no correlation between this_is_article_title and the id 24, the only way to achieve this is by either adding the id to the url too, or to have the php lookup the news-article with this title in the database.

This last solution however has some problems, as the you can’t just us the title in a url. You have to escape characters. Also you’ll have to add a index for the title row in the DB for better performance.

So I’ll go with the first solution. We will generate urls like this

http://localhost/news/24/this_is_article_title

First the php part

function news_preview() {
$query = "SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 5  ";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)) 
{ 
  $url = "/news/$row[id]/".preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9-_]/', '_', $row['title']);  
  echo "<a href=\"$url\">  ". substr($row['title'], 0,26)."...</a><br/>".; }
}

Next comes the htaccess part.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)$ DIRECTORY/AID/news.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]

That should do it I think.