Question

I’m currently building a web app with Codeigniter. I noticed their documentation favors segmented URLs over query strings which makes sense since they’re so much easier to read and look nicer. I was also browsing threadless.com the other day and really liked the way they formatted their queries:

Normally, a query would look like this:

http://www.threadless.com/catalog/index.php?type=guys&view=25&size=3xl

But Threadless uses this format:

http://www.threadless.com/catalog/type,guys/view,25/size,3xl

How do they get that format? Does it involve the .htaccess? Does that format play nice with Codeigniter or would it involve a custom function?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can do something similar where you can have.

http://www.threadless.com/catalog/type/guys/view/25/size/3x1

To do so, you’d have a controller function like:

class Catalog extends CI_Controller {
    function catalog()
    {
        $params = $this->uri->uri_to_assoc(3);
    }
}

Which would output something like:

Array
(
    [type] => 'guys'
    [view] => 25
    [size] => '3x1'
)

If you want the commas, you’d want to touch .htaccess to rewrite all “,” into “/”.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^([^\,]*)\,(.*)$
RewriteRule .* %1/%2 [R=301,L]