Question

I have been finding myself doing URLs like this:

$link = base_url('post') . '/' . $post_id . '/' . $slug . '/page/' . $page_num;

To form http://example.com/post/10/some-post-name/page/1

Needless to say, it’s pretty messy, but I can’t think of an alternative? Is there a better way write links with variables in it?

I am using Codeigniter as a framework if there is a solution involving it.

Answer 1

You have a few ways:

First, via sprintf:

sprintf('%s/%s/%s/page/%s', base_url('post'), $post_id, $slug, $page_num);

Or via an array implode:

implode('/', array(base_url('post'), $post_id, $slug, 'page', $page_num));

Or if you put all your values into variables, you can take advantage of string interpolation.

$url = ...;
...
"$url/$post_id/$slug/page/$page_num";

The last one is longer when you take into account the variable assignment block, but it combines succintness with readability.