Question

i would like a simple help…
i have a url like this:
example.com/profile.php?id= & name=

my .htaccess file like this.

RewriteRule ^profile/(.)/(.) profile.php?id=$1&name=$2

so i have a end url like this:
example.com/profile/id/name

i can make
example.com/id

but how can i get a url like this:

example.com/name

??

thax

Answer 1

If what you’re looking for is exactly this:

example.com/name

You will need to change your profile.php to only expect the name variable, and use it to query the database.

I believe previously you had something like:

mysql_query("SELECT * from table where id=$id");

You will need to change it to be

mysql_query("SELECT * from table where name$name");

So you are telling your page to query the user by the name, instead of by the ID.

There’s a few drawbacks related to this, as your query won’t be as fast as it used to be, as I believe your name column is not the primary key, therefore no indexing.

Twitter uses Rails, so they will be calling it in a slightly different way using something like (onMissingMethod):

get_user_by_username()

Which isn’t great either, as it’s still querying the database by a string, but has some performance improvements to enable rails to do that.

Your htaccess will then looki like:

RewriteRule ^(.*) profile.php?name=$1

Hope that answers your question