PHP & MOD_REWRITE

[jacquesy]

Hello - Is it possible to insert a PHP variable into the url of a page?

I have inherited a problem and I need to make a meaningless URL, like this....

http://www.mywebsite.com/subjects/db/course.php?courseid=1000

and replace it with this...

http://www.mywebsite.com/subjects/accounting

I know this is possible using MOD_REWRITE and manually changing each and every subject in the htaccess file (there are 500) but I was wondering if it's possible to bring the name of the subject (ie. accounting in this example) from the database into the url at each request?

Thanks, Neil.

[cahva]

You have to redefine your database so that you would have unique coursename for every row(seo friendly address also known as "slugs").

Then with .htaccess in the www-root you can define it like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^subjects/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ subjects/course.php?coursename=$1 [L]

Now when you input http://www.mywebsite.com/subjects/accounting
..it would actually execute it like this:
http://www.mywebsite.com/subjects/course.php?coursename=accounting

In the course.php you simply look for $_GET['coursename'] and search that from the database.