In this tutorial I will show you how to make nice looking, search engine friendly URLs in PHP without Mod_Rewrite.
Make a URL that looks like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?page=about&user=Evan&index=2
Look like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/about/Evan/2
Put the following code into a file called index.php and upload it to your server.
<?php
// Get the URL relative to the script
$url = $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
// If for some reason $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"] does not work then
// you could use $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] or $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]
// Remove the /index.php/ at the beginning
$url = preg_replace('/^(\/)/','',$url);
// Split URL into array
$url = explode('/',$url);
// Display array
print_r($url);
?>
If you visited the URL index.php/about/Evan/2 the above should output something like this:
Array
(
[0] => about,
[1] => Evan,
[2] => 2
)
If you visited the URL index.php/21/five/uno/wow the output would look like this:
Array
(
[0] => 21,
[1] => five,
[2] => uno,
[3] => wow
)
As you can see this method allows a virtually unlimited amount of "directories" in your URL. The CodeIgniter Framework uses a very similar method for its URLs.
See what others have to say on this topic, or add your own two cents.