Question

Ok this maybe sound like the worst question on stackoverflow but here it is.

In a folder offers I have those files:

product.php
category.php

To display a product I type domain.com/offers/product.php?id=1 and
to display a category, I type domain.com/offers/category.php?id=1

Because this url looks ugly I rewrite for example the product.php using .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9]+)?$ product.php?id=$1 [NC,L]

and this gives me a domain.com/offers/1

Because product.php and category.php are in the same folder and both gets a numeric variable, that means it will not execute correctly.

So a possible way is to have a slug for category.php and keep the id for product.php and then write some code for it.

My question is, is this the only way ?

Update
I didn’t tried it but what if I have the one as product.php?pid=1 and the other category.php?cid=1 ?

Answer 1

You will need to differentiate them in the URL. This scheme would make the URLs into:

example.com/offers/category/1
example.com/offers/product/99

Done via:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^offers/(product|category)/([a-z0-9]+)?$ $1.php?id=$2 [NC,L,QSA]

The first group (product|category) captures the destination script, which is translated to $1.php. The second group is translated to to the associated id.

Update

You don’t have to have them appear as separate directories /products, /categories but you do have to have some way of differentiating them. Instead you can place a p or c at the start of the ID number:

example.com/offers/c1
example.com/offers/p99

Done via:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^offers/p([a-z0-9]+)?$ product.php?id=$1 [NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^offers/c([a-z0-9]+)?$ category.php?id=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

Or you can expand them out to