URI processing

saraadmin

This may be slightly OT:

Does anyone know if there is a way of capturing capturing elements of the URI using Apache and sending them to a PHP script?

So that, e.g., I could have URIs like:
http://domain.com/folder/doc.xml
which Apache doesn't interpret as fetching the 'doc.xml' file from the directory called 'folder' but rather invokes a PHP script with the URI components available as variables.

I'm aware that I could use Apache's DirectoryIndex directive with a named PHP script (e.g. 'site.php') and then manipulate the $_SERVER['URI'] variable in that script, but is there a way of using, for example, Apache's LocationMatch directive with a regular expression for the URIs and sending the component parts to a script?

e.g.
<LocationMatch "^{/domain.com/([^{/])/({^.]).(.*)$">}}

where $1 would be the 'directory' part of the URI, $2 would be the 'filename' part and $3 would be the 'extension' part?

saraadmin

Sorry, where I've put Apache's 'DirectoryIndex' directive, I meant 'DocumentRoot'...

Weedpacket

Hmmm... interesting question. Does $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] contain the original URI or the mapped version?

saraadmin

When you say 'mapped version', do you mean when using Apache directive:

DocumentRoot site.php

If you do this, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] will contain the complete URI as requested by the client.

The problem with this method is that the rest of your Apache configuration for the server (or VirtualHost) becomes redundant.

One thing I have done in the past is use RewriteRules to map URIs to query strings for PHP scripts:

RewriteRule ^{/([^{/])/({^.]).(.*)$}} http://domain.com/getRecord.php?table=$1&id=$2&format=$3 [NC]

which works but is a bit clunky.

Essentially, Apache configuration files are suited to this task. They are not programming languages and don't have variables or other such features.

(The original question was inspired by Cocoon which allows you to work with URI 'patterns' and extracts matches from these regular expressions as variables which you can go to use in the configuration file; you can create a 'virtual directory structure'.)