Question

I was wondering if I’m supposed to use .htaccess to change a get variable to a value from the database (username).

so if there is

http://www.url.com/user.php?u=1

how do you conver it to

http://www.url.com/andrewliu

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to change your user.php to take a username instead of a userid. Then you can use something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z0-9_-]+)/?$ /user.php?u=$1 [L]

This passes the username through the u query string parameter, essentially: /user.php?u=andrewliu

Otherwise there’s no way htaccess and mod_rewrite can know what the mapping is between user_id and username. Alternatively, you can write a database script and use RewriteMap to create a mapping for you:

RewriteMap usermap prg:/path/to/userscript

and in your htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z0-9_-]+)/?$ /user.php?u=${usermap:$1} [L]

The last option, if you’ve only got, say, 5 users (or some small amount), you can make explicit rewrites:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?andrewliu$ /user.php?u=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/?anotheruser$ /user.php?u=2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/?foousername$ /user.php?u=3 [L]