[RESOLVED] Rewrite URLs with names from database

skodicious

I have urls such as -> products.php?category=38

How would I rewrite these Urls to something like -> products/modern-lighting
("Modern Lighting" would be the category name which comes from the database table for category 38)

I understand how to do basic url rewriting with the htaccess, but I'm stumped on how to turn that number '38' into its category name.

Does anyone have an idea?

bradgrafelman

Redirect all '/products/(.*)' URLs to a PHP script with a query string (e.g. 'products.php?catname=$1') - your PHP script would then convert the 'modern-lighting' name into the appropriate category ID (or do whatever you wanted it to do).

skodicious

Thanks, bradgrafelman. Can you show some example script for the htaccess and the php file. I'm still a bit confused on how to do this.

bradgrafelman

RewriteRule ^products/([^/]+)$ products.php?catname=$1

Thus, a URL like http://yoursite.com/products/modern-lighting would internally redirect to http://yoursite.com/products.php?catname=modern-lighting .

All you'd have to do is write the PHP code that takes 'modern-lighting' and outputs the appropriate information.

skodicious

RewriteRule ^products/([^/]+)$ products.php?catname=$1

Thanks again. However, my problem is that the field under catname is a number. So the actual URL is http://mysite.com/products.php?category=38

Thus, this Rewrite won't necessarily work, because it would only rewrite it to say http://mysite.com/38

My question is how to somehow tell the htaccess to pull the title of category 38 from the database (which would be 'modern-lighting'). Then it could clean up the URL and change the number 38 to 'modern-lighting'. It would have to do this dynamically to every products page.

Does my question make sense? Thank you once again for the taking the moment to answer my questions.

bradgrafelman

I'm confused; what URL do you want users to see?

skodicious

I apologize, let me clarify.

All the urls on this website contain product urls which look like this:
http://mysite.com/products.php?category=38

Simply stated, I would like to change the urls to be SEO friendly--not simply get rid of strange characters and unneeded words (?, =, category)--but to insert the proper category title into the url.
The bolded example url above should be changed to look like this:
http://mysite.com/products/modern-lighting/

I know how to change urls in the htaccess with regular expressions. That is not the problem. The problem is how to change that number '38' to its corresponding title (from that particular database table).

skodicious

I talked to a good friend (http://www.thechrislondonproject.com) and he wrote up this example code to grab the category name.

Now if a user goes to products.php?category_name=modern-lighting, the page knows where to pick up the data from the database.

Now all I have to do is insert the correct regex in the htaccess to convert that url to products/modern-lighting.

Problem has been solved. Thanks for your help.

if ([COLOR="Blue"]$_GET[/COLOR][[COLOR="Red"]'category_name'[/COLOR]]){
	$category_name = [COLOR="Blue"]str_replace[/COLOR]([COLOR="Red"]"-"[/COLOR], [COLOR="Red"]" "[/COLOR], [COLOR="Blue"]$_GET[/COLOR][[COLOR="Red"]'category_name'[/COLOR]]);
	$results = [COLOR="Blue"]mysql_query[/COLOR]([COLOR="Red"]"SELECT category_id FROM cat WHERE name LIKE '%"[/COLOR] [COLOR="Blue"]. mysql_real_escape_string[/COLOR]($category_name) . [COLOR="Red"]"%' LIMIT 1"[/COLOR]);
	[COLOR="Blue"]$_GET[/COLOR][[COLOR="Red"]'category'[/COLOR]] = [COLOR="Blue"]mysql_result[/COLOR]($results, [COLOR="Red"]0[/COLOR], [COLOR="Red"]'category_id'[/COLOR]);
}