parse variables in url

Anon

Ok. Here's my problem:

If any of my visitors would want to read news article no 187, I'd like them to be able to pu "www.mydomain.no/news/187" in their address-field, rather than "www.mydoman.no/?section=news&id=187".

Kind of like the "www.php.net/strlen"-search feature, if you see what I mean.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Svein halvor

Anon

You know how apache lets you set the 404 error document to a certain file?

set it.

then at the top of the file, put some php code.

this code checks if the file they're requesting, such as

"www.mydomain.no/news/187"

exists in the news database and if so redirects them using a header("Location: ") to that site such as
"www.mydoman.no/?section=news&id=187"

if the page asked for doesn't have a news item or is garbage, do nothing and display the rest of teh 404error page you made.

good luck
--harlan

Anon

You can also use ScriptAlias in Apache.

If you did something like

ScriptAlias /news/ .../news/
DirectoryIndex index.php

in Apache, I think you can

/news/187/

If you put an index.php in .../news/ then you can parse out the 187. I even think that '187/' might be passed into the PATH_INFO environment variable which makes it even easier.

Anon

Check if you have mod_rewrite compiled with your apache. Then if you name the articles
/news/187.html, put an .htaccess file in the news direcory and have the following in it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ news.php?id=$1

Good Luck.