Question

I want to apply the page HTML title in the URL

for example in here (stackoverflow) the url is something like that:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10000000/get-the-title-of-a-page-url

you can see the “get-the-title-of-a-page-url” part which is the page title

what i mean is when the user go to spowpost.php?post=1

the actual url that shows up when the pages load will be
spowpost.php?post=1$title=..the_title..

how can i do that?

EDIT: i was thinking about htaccess , but i don’t know this very well so tutorial would help for this CERTAIN case..

Answer 1

You can use .htaccess for this. For example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^questions/(\d+)/([a-z-]+) index.php?id=$1&title=$2 [L]

Your PHP page (index.php) receives the id and title as parameters in $_GET[]:

echo $_GET['title'];
// get-the-title-of-a-page-url

You can then use that (or the id, which is easier) to retrieve the correct item from your data source:

// Assuming you didn't store the - in the database, replace them with spaces
$real_title = str_replace("-", " ", $_GET['title']);
$real_title = mysql_real_escape_string($real_title);

// Query it with something like
SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE LOWER(title) = '$real_title';

Assuming you do have an id parameter in the URL of some sort, it’s easier to query based on that value. The title portion can be used really only to make a readable URL, without needing to act on it in PHP.

In reverse, to convert the title to the format-like-this-to-use-in-urls, do:

$url_title = strtolower(str_replace(' ', '-', $original_title));

The above assumes your titles don’t include any characters that are illegal in a URL…

$article_link = "http://example.com/spowpost.php?post=$postid&$title=$url_title";

Or to feed to .htaccess:

$article_link = "http://example.com/spowpost$postid/$url_title";