Question about URLS

[Novdeloth]

Hello,

I'm quite new to this board but not-so-new to PHP. I've been practicing with it since this summer and I'm improving steadily (okay, slowly) with the help of many tutorials. However, I've been looking for a tutorial that deals with URLs and I can't find it.

All right, lemme see if I can put this into words... okay, for example, there's a site where the address is:
http://www.website.com/
Plain and simple, right there in the address bar.

I click on a link on the index page that says "features" and after the new page has finished loading, the addy in the address bar is now:
http://www.website.com/index.php?z=features

How is that possible? I know that there is probably a "features.php" file in the same directory, but how does one make the URL appear like that? (And I apologize if this has come up before; I haven't really browsed through all the threads.)

Thanks for taking the time to read this, hope someone can help!

[xentrix]

Hi Novdeloth!

I think that probably there no file feratures.php in the directory but in the file index.php there is some switch like:

switch (z) {
  case "features"  : echo "features";
                               break;
  case "contact"    : echo "address";
                               break;
  case "news"       : echo "news";
                               break;
  default            : echo "welcome on my page";
                               break;
}

It means that whole content of the site is in the index.php file (and there are no other files with a content) and depends on vallue of $z which part will be written on the screen. It uses something like "template"...

There's more possibilities how to do that - I wrote only about one of them.

I hope I helped you a liitle.

[daynah]

And if your pages are longer, you probably don't want to echo out the text, but rather include the data as files. I wrote a small script to do such the trick.

<?PHP

// Sample script written by Daynah

// Where all your text files are located at 
// This can be just . if it is the current directory
$directory = './version2/';

// If the variable exists
// Example: If the url is index.php?page=aboutme
if($page)
{
       // Does the file $directory/$page.txt exist?
       if(is_file("$directory$page.txt"))
               include("$directory$page.txt");
       else
               print "Sorry, this page does not exist";
}

// If the page is just called as index.php
// Then just include the default main.txt page
else
{
       $mypage = 'main.txt';
       include("$directory$mypage");
}
?>

If you need more help, click here 🙂 enjoy.

[Novdeloth]

Hmm... interesting. I'll try out both examples. I'll come whining back here if nothing works. :p Thanks, guys!

[Novdeloth]

Huzzah, they both worked! Thanks so much, Daynah and xentrix. As soon as I've finished constructing my page, I'll let you see the results.

Thanks again!

[r4ck4]

so i got another newbie-question.
what about including .html or .php pages. if i understand the script it works with different .txt -files - one per site?
could i just change the extension ?

very dumb?

[the_Igel]

When you include() file, the php parser deals with it as if it's html/php file, no matter what extension it has. It includes the file into the script and parses it as the rest of the code, assuming that there is '?>' before the included code and '<?php' after it. So you can insert any html or php code in your scripts, just remember to put php-tags in included file, if it is to be parsed.

Hope I made it a bit clearer.

[r4ck4]

sorry, i didnt pose the question correctly..
i wanted to ask how to modify the script found on the top of the page if i want to refer to .php -files instead of .txt files...

[the_Igel]

replace '.txt' with '.php' - isn't that obvious?

[Esteanil]

Whey, nice thread, just what I was looking for, but how I do drop the "page" or "z" variable?

Like, I want to make a page that shows like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?articlenumber

where articlenumber is replaced by the article number, naturally ;-)

Thanks! :-)

[chads2k2]

www.website.com?variable=value

anything after the ? is a variable and it equals a value. If you have more than one variable do ?variable1=hello;variable2=Kitty ............. or.......... ?variable1=Hello&variable2=Kitty.......

Either way will work. Though check the ; part. I don't know if that one will still work. 😕

I love Daynah! HAHA.

Chad