Question

What is the difference between…

http://mysite.com/12345
and
http://mysite.com/an6

I am wondering because it would be easier to handle everything as numbers and I still see no reason to move from numbers to alpha numeric.

Answer 1

Essentially in the two examples you gave there is not much difference. Other than the fact that you could include more non-informative characters. There is no (human readable) information contained within the URL’s… They might hold :

• Article ID
• User ID
• Thread ID
• Error pages
• etc…

The difference comes into play when you start to embed some useful information in those URLs… Take for example the URL’s on this site – specifically yours and its address –

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9749505/numeric-vs-alphanumeric-url

So what can we see from here (other than that its a Stack Overflow link and obviously the right source for getting your progrmaming questions answered 😉

1. It is a link to a question – stackoverflow.com/questions/
2. The question’s ID is 9749505 – stackoverflow.com/questions/9749505
3. We can see a preview of the title of the question questions/9749505/numeric-vs-alphanumeric-url

To get these “friendly URLs” one could possibly use a .htaccess file redirecting requests between URL’s.

Here is a simple example of what an .htaccess file could accomplish :

RewriteCond $1 ^questions/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^questions/(.*)$ getQuestion.php?id=$1 [L]

Whats happening here is this – the actual URL that the user and browser sees is :
example.com/questions/12345
But the actual script that process the request is getQuestion.php and it gets passed a variable that was extracted from the original URL (specifically the number). Then that script will retrieve the content and display it but the URL remains the same URL with the /questions/12345.

In actual fact the getQuestion.php file will handle all requests to questions.

So you see, there is no real difference between alphanumeric and numeric URLs – the difference is when you start embedding useful info into them making simply reading their names more informative for the user (and for you as the developer).