capturing entered url to conditionally branch to specific pages

drexcol

My website (e.g. mainwebsite.com) has several aliases (e.g. alpha.com, delta.com, epsilon.com, etc.)

Therefore I need a simple script to to allow conditional branching based on the url the visitor has entered.

For example, entering alpha.com will direct the visitor to www.mainwebsite.com/flowers.html; entering delta.com will direct the visitor to
www.mainwebsite.com/animals.html, etc.

Any suggestions?

Your help is greatly appreciated. I have looked at various PHP books, but have not found any answers. As you can no doubt imagine, doing this is a handy way for one website account to, in effect, be used for a number of quite different sites.

Thanks again.

Paul

bradgrafelman

Sounds like a job for a [man]switch/man statement along with $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. You might want to use [man]str_replace/man to remove 'www.' as well, and just use the actual domain name in the switch(), i.e. delta.com.

thorpe

This sounds much more like a server issue than a php one to me. If your going to let the request get all the way to a php page before a descision is made, its allready gone too far.

bradgrafelman

True, I was going to mention something about virtual servers, but... shrug

drexcol

Thanks for your help.
As to doing something at the server level, I thought that might result in additional problems. Several times my service provider has switched servers, which caused problems. Last time, the new server was running a slightly different system which affected the variables in my shopping cart (which I wrote all using Flash). As a result,
for a while, my shopping cart was inoperable and I had to rewrite my php script.

I will try your suggestion, bradgrafelman, and use $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. In my example, would that return (e.g. ) delta.com, which I could use as a variable?

I have also heard about $REQUEST_URI. Any opinions as to that approach?

So I guess, I would incorporate a simple php script capturing the variable of the entered url and then use switch or if statements to redirect to the appropriate page as my index
page.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

Paul

bradgrafelman

$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] will return whatever hostname the user typed in, whether that be delta.com or www.delta.com - hence why I suggested stripping the 'www.' off of the string before using it in a switch() statement.