Alternative to ErrorDocument

phpmavenman

I have seen many URLs over the years that take out the Query String and simply append a single variable to the end of a url (here are a couple of examples)

whois.sc/google.com
cafepress.com/shopid
tinyurl.com/1c2

I have used in the past ForceType when there is a static filename appended to the url followed by vars that can be parsed.

Would there be any way to achieve the above type of dynamic urls without using ErrorDocument?

My goal is to process the appended variable string through a single static file or the index file.

Has anyone setup url processing similar to the examples above? if so, how did you successfully do so?

Weedpacket

The Apache server has a module called mod_rewrite. It's for rewriting URLs. A simpler version is called mod_alias; it allows setting up one URL as an alias for another.

phpmavenman

Does mod_rewrite or mod_alias keep the URL in the browser intact as the user originally entered it?

For example using the whois.sc example from my original post, the url stays whois.sc/google.com after the page loads. In my brief review of mod_rewrite it appears as though the browser location would change to reflect the rewrite.

I would like the URL to stay in the form whois.sc/google.com instead of rewriten to something like whois.sc/index.php?domain=google.com or even whois.sc/?domain=google.com.

I am unfamiliar with mod_alias. Would you by chance have a working example of how that mod would work in this instance?

phpmavenman

I had originally focused my search to mod_rewrite but after review of mod_alias it appears as though it would accomplish my goal. Here is another post that has a little more details:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10300798&highlight=mod_alias

Thanks for your help Weedpacket

phpmavenman

I have the following so far. It doesn't accomplish exactly what I want, but it is a start:

RedirectMatch /(.*)[^.php|/]$ http://www.domain.com/id.php?id=$1

I am not a strong RegEx user so I need a little help with why the last character of any string that I put in gets trunced like

http://www.domain.com/mavenman

returns

http://www.domain.com/id.php?id=mavenma (<- notice the missing N at the end)

That is one issue. My second is that I was hoping to keep the URL clean and internally redirect the request but I have yet to find this solution. So basically to the client browser the location would still be http://www.domain.com/mavenman but internally the request is processed through id.php like the RedirectMatch does now.

Any help on either of these two issues?

phpmavenman

Okay, worked through my first issue finding out that I needed a ^ before the forward slash. All works fine on passing the id to the id.php script now. I am still wondering how I can accomplish my second issue of masking the URL so the client still just sees the domain with the appended id instead of the Redirected URL.

phpmavenman wrote:
My second is that I was hoping to keep the URL clean and internally redirect the request but I have yet to find this solution. So basically to the client browser the location would still be http://www.domain.com/mavenman but internally the request is processed through id.php like the RedirectMatch does now.

Any help on either of these two issues?