Redirect Folder to File?

[Anon]

Hi everyone,

I'm not exactly sure if this is the right place to ask this question but...here goes...

I need to be able to dynamically redirect users to my php script (from a folder) and pass a username to the script. Here's what I mean:

mysite.com/jsmith

• needs to redirect to -

mysite.com/user.php?u=jsmith

The thing is, I need to emulate the folders (they are non-existant), kind of like what geocities does (www.geocities.com/thisusername most likely redirects to another directory on their servers where the user's files are stored).

I thought I would have to do some kind of .htaccess stuff, but I don't know exactly how I would go about doing something like this. My other though would be to make a MIME type with no extension (never tried this, so I don't know if it's possible) and interpret it as a php script.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your time!

[Anon]

See if Tim's article on this site will help.

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3

Richie.

[Anon]

Thanks Richie,

That helps a little bit, but I need to actually pass a variable from the .htaccess file to my php script, I'm having a bit of trouble because the usernames are not static, they always change.

Does anyone know how to redirect from a folder (/name) to my script /script.php?u=name, where the "name" is dynamic?

I've gotten about this far with my .htaccess file, though, I doubt it will work because I'm not familiar (or in other words...knows nothing 😉 with regex and all that fun stuff (I've been doing tons of research -http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^{/([uge])/([/]+)$} /page.php?u=$1 [R]

That is pretty much copied and pasted from the above apache doc, and it's not working on the server I'm testing it on (unforunatly, at the moment, my other server is down so I can't test it there, and .htaccess files don't seem to wanna run on XP).

Any ideas?