Question

I’m aware that there are a hundred articles, tutorials and manuals on Mod Rewrite but i tend to learn better by examples, so all i’m asking is for a quick pretty url conversion and i’ll be on my way (so i can dissect exactly what its doing, so i can apply it to others)

I have this URL: http://www.example.com/single.php?id=1

Now it would be great if it could follow the same convention as Stack Overflow where the id=1 is the actual title of the page.

I have the title in a PHP variable if thats any help?

I would be grateful if someone could turn the above into: http://www.example.com/single/here-is-my-cool-title (where the last bit is dynamic, depending on a PHP variable)

Is that possible?

Answer 1

SO actually has the post ID and the title in the url, but they’ll only use the post ID. The title isn’t very suitable, as there may be duplicate posts (same title, different id), title changes, etc. For the url of this question:

/questions/5142095/pretty-urls-for-web-application

To resolve to this:

/single.php?id=5142095

The rewrite rule will be:

RewriteRule ^questions/([0-9]*)/(.*)$ /single.php?id=$1

What this looks for is the start of the uri (after the domain) ^, the word questions, any length of numbers `[0

This looks for:

• ^ the start of the URI
• the word questions
• a slash /
• a variable length of numbers [0-9]* (such as 1, 123, 1234 etc)
• a slash /
• any length of any character .* (ie the question title)
• $ the end of the URI

When the character match (such as [0-9]* or .*) is in brackets, mod_rewrite puts the match result into a numbered dollar variable. In the rule above, [0-9]* matches any number (and any length of numbers) and puts it into $1. The second match .* matches any length of any character, and puts the match into $2.

Your application will receive the URI on the right side of the rule, with the dollar variables replaced with the matches.