Problem with URL rewriting using .htaccess based Articles
Problem with URL rewriting using .htaccess based Articles.
This small writing is intended only for the beginners. It is not for the coders who have know-how of .htaccess and are experts or advanced programmers.
Url rewriting using .htaccess is very common now-a-days for the programmers who work especially in PHP on linux or unix based Operating systems with Apache as a web server.
.htaccess is a Global Configuration file in Apache. It is not only used to make redirection but it is also used for many other tasks like Stop displaying the directories of the site if there is no Index or start up page, changing the start up page to something else etc. I am not going into detail of it as you can find much about on internet.
Visit Apache rewrite guide for this purpose if you are interested in knowing further about the rewriting.
The only purpose for this small article was to address the issue with the articles for url rewriting while they are written and published.
They mention in detail about what the rewriting URLs is. They gave examples how to use that but they don’t mention about to change URLs in the code. Coders must write and make URLs according to SEO friendly format and then define a rule for them in .htaccess.
They just mention this is URL and see how it will be redirected.
Example:
Rewriting product.php?id=12 to product/ipod-nano/12.html
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+)\.html$ product.php?id=$2
The author has mentioned about the url and showed that how the url will be redirected seamlessly. Definitely it will come from the Browsers address bar. But he has not mentioned that this kind of URLs will be made in their programming coding.
Why it is essential, because for the beginners it becomes difficult to understand. So whenever such articles must be written, they must start from making the ground.
Conclusion
A coder must think how the urls will look like before making rules, then he must format the links generated from his code, for instance, make a link for editing the profile of a user according to what he has planned.
Example: http://www.domain.com/profile/Murtaza-2/
Or
http://www.domain.com/profile/Murtaza/2/
It must be generated through the code.
Then he can write a rule in .htaccess like this.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^profile/([a-zA-Z]+)-([0-9]+)/$ acp/users/options/profile.php?name=$1&idPk=$2
This “acp/users/options/profile.php†is the directory structure where the profile.php is present. Use your own path.
One more thing to be noticeable that when you write a SEO friendly URL which has some query string, You must enclose your query string portion with Parenthesis ‘()’ without single quote. Because it tells the rule that now the sub pattern is going to be started. And it assigns the value to the right hand side’s variables defined as $1, $2 so on.
e.g, in the above rule this part ([a-zA-Z]+) tells the Rule to assign whatsoever is coming at let to right hand side’s $1 and this ([0-9]+)/$ to $2. Note down the parenthesis.
Thanks
Syed Murtaza Hussain Kazmi
PHP and Dotnet 1.1 Website and Software Engineer
Efficiency in code is good but that must be reasonable.
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