MartinW
MartinW

Reputation: 248

PHP Rewrite Rules

The actually URL which my app uses is:

http://site.com/search.php?search=iPhone 

but I would like it to be possible to achieve the same with

http://site.com/iPhone

I have no experience of rewrite rules, how can I set this up?

The solution has worked but the new URL is displayed in the address bar. I thought it would have been possible to set this up so that it appears as though the page location is

http://site.com/iPhone

without changing to display

http://site.com/search.php?search=iPhone 

Is this possible? Thanks.

Upvotes: 8

Views: 31158

Answers (3)

Christian C. Salvadó
Christian C. Salvadó

Reputation: 828002

You need to specify something like this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /(.*) /search.php?search=$1

Check also:

Upvotes: 5

Chris Lutz
Chris Lutz

Reputation: 75469

Rewrite rules aren't part of PHP as far as I'm aware, but Apache (specifically mod_rewrite) or whatever server you're using. For Apache, you need on the server to have a file called .htaccess, and in it put something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(\w+)/?$ /index.php?search=$1

^(\w+)/?$ is a regular expression - it matches any word of 1 or more characters, followed by a / maybe. So it changes site.com/iPhone into site.com/index.php?search=iPhone. Sound about right?

Upvotes: 3

Toby Allen
Toby Allen

Reputation: 11211

Create a file called .htaccess in the root of your website and put this in it.

RewriteEngine on 
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase / 

RewriteRule ^(.*) search.php?search=$1 [R]

Should do the trick.

I would suggest however that you make it a bit more specific, so maybe require the user of a search directory in your url. eg instead of mysite.com/IPhone use mysite.com/search/IPhone which would work like

RewriteEngine on 
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase / 

RewriteRule ^search/(.*) search.php?search=$1 [R]

This makes it easier to have normal pages that arnt redirected, such as about us or a basic homepage.

As Chris says, this is not PHP but Apache that does this, and whether it works can depend on your hosting setup.

Upvotes: 12

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