Question

Im trying to pass some variables from the URL to the PHP script. Now I know that www.site.com/index.php?link=HELLO would require $_GET['link'] to get the variable “link”. I was hoping there are other ways to do this without the variable.

For instance I want a link structure like this: www.site.com/HELLO. In this example I know that I have to create a Directory called Hello place an index file and it should work but I don’t want to create a directory and Im hoping there’s a way to “catch” that extra part after the domain. I’m thinking of creating a custom HTTP 404 Page that will somehow get the variable of the not found page, but I don’t know how to get the HTTP 404 error parameters. Is there another simpler way to get a variable without the use of the extra ?link= part? I just want it to be a structure like this www.site.com/HELLO.

Answer 1

What you want is URL rewriting. You don’t mention what kind of web server you’re using, so I’ll assume it’s Apache.

If you have mod_rewrite enabled on your web server, this can easily be accomplished by creating a .htaccess file in your document root with the following

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?request=$1

This will make all requests – that match the regular expression [a-zA-Z0-9]+ – get forwarded to index.php. For instance, if you try to access domain.com/hello, PHP would interpret this as trying to access index.php?request=hello.

You can read more about this in the Apache HTTP Server manual about mod_rewrite.