How to create friendly URL in php?

Question

Normally, the practice or very old way of displaying some profile page is like this:

www.domain.com/profile.php?u=12345

where u=12345 is the user id.

In recent years, I found some website with very nice urls like:

www.domain.com/profile/12345

How do I do this in PHP?

Just as a wild guess, is it something to do with the .htaccess file? Can you give me more tips or some sample code on how to write the .htaccess file?

Answer 1

There are lots of different ways to do this. One way is to use the RewriteRule techniques mentioned earlier to mask query string values.

One of the ways I really like is if you use the front controller pattern, you can also use urls like http://yoursite.com/index.php/path/to/your/page/here and parse the value of $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].

You can easily extract the /path/to/your/page/here bit with the following bit of code:

$route = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], strlen($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']));

From there, you can parse it however you please, but for pete's sake make sure you sanitise it ;)

Answer 2

I try to explain this problem step by step in following example.

0) Question

I try to ask you like this :

i want to open page like facebook profile www.facebook.com/kaila.piyush

it get id from url and parse it to profile.php file and return featch data from database and show user to his profile

normally when we develope any website its link look like www.website.com/profile.php?id=username example.com/weblog/index.php?y=2000&m=11&d=23&id=5678

now we update with new style not rewrite we use www.website.com/username or example.com/weblog/2000/11/23/5678 as permalink

http://example.com/profile/userid (get a profile by the ID) 
http://example.com/profile/username (get a profile by the username) 
http://example.com/myprofile (get the profile of the currently logged-in user)

1) .htaccess

Create a .htaccess file in the root folder or update the existing one :

Options +FollowSymLinks
# Turn on the RewriteEngine
RewriteEngine On
#  Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php

What does that do ?

If the request is for a real directory or file (one that exists on the server), index.php isn't served, else every url is redirected to index.php.

2) index.php

Now, we want to know what action to trigger, so we need to read the URL :

In index.php :

// index.php    

// This is necessary when index.php is not in the root folder, but in some subfolder...
// We compare $requestURL and $scriptName to remove the inappropriate values
$requestURI = explode(‘/’, $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]);
$scriptName = explode(‘/’,$_SERVER[‘SCRIPT_NAME’]);

for ($i= 0; $i < sizeof($scriptName); $i++)
{
    if ($requestURI[$i] == $scriptName[$i])
    {
        unset($requestURI[$i]);
    }
}

$command = array_values($requestURI);
With the url http://example.com/profile/19837, $command would contain :

$command = array(
    [0] => 'profile',
    [1] => 19837,
    [2] => ,
)
Now, we have to dispatch the URLs. We add this in the index.php :

// index.php

require_once("profile.php"); // We need this file
switch($command[0])
{
    case ‘profile’ :
        // We run the profile function from the profile.php file.
        profile($command([1]);
        break;
    case ‘myprofile’ :
        // We run the myProfile function from the profile.php file.
        myProfile();
        break;
    default:
        // Wrong page ! You could also redirect to your custom 404 page.
        echo "404 Error : wrong page.";
        break;
}

2) profile.php

Now in the profile.php file, we should have something like this :

// profile.php

function profile($chars)
{
    // We check if $chars is an Integer (ie. an ID) or a String (ie. a potential username)

    if (is_int($chars)) {
        $id = $chars;
        // Do the SQL to get the $user from his ID
        // ........
    } else {
        $username = mysqli_real_escape_string($char);
        // Do the SQL to get the $user from his username
        // ...........
    }

    // Render your view with the $user variable
    // .........
}

function myProfile()
{
    // Get the currently logged-in user ID from the session :
    $id = ....

    // Run the above function :
    profile($id);
}