Question

I have noticed that many websites use urls that end in

website.com/index.php?var="value"&var2="value2"

and I was wondering how I could make it so that instead of having that be the end of the URL have this instead:

website.com/value/value2

and then have it so that instead of searching for “/value/value2” inside of the servers root folder it would instead just open index.php and then inside the PHP coding have a function that would get what the URL is. Either as a string “/value/value2” or an array “value” “value2” it doesn’t matter but just some way of getting those variables. This would be so that the URL could be cleaned up and easy to tell where you were in the website.

Also if there is a way of doing this would it be possible for style.php that is in the same folder as index.php (but has a PHP header setting it to output CSS) that would be called in the head of index.php using <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" url="style.php" /> or whatever the syntax for that is, to be able to obtain that same variable so that the css styling could be changed according to the URL.

Answer 1

You can use rewriting of urls in .htaccess file

Check this.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+) /?var=$1&var2=$2 [L]

There are three parts to this:

1. RewriteRule specifies that this is a rule for rewriting (as opposed to a condition or some other directive). The command is to rewrite part 2 into part 3.
2. This part is a regex, and the rule will be run only if the URL matches this regex. In this case, it says – look for the beginning of the string, then a bunch of non-slash characters, then a slash, then another bunch of non-slash characters. then again bunch of non-slash characters, then a slash, then another bunch of non-slash characters. The parentheses mean the parts within the parentheses will be stored for future reference.
3. Finally, this part says to rewrite the given URL in this format. $1 and $2 refer to the parts that were captured and stored.

Refer Beginner’s Guide to mod_rewrite.
Also tutorial for same.