How was a URL like http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit created in PHP?

Question

When you edit a question on stackoverflow.com, you will be redirected to a URL like this:

https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1807421/edit

Answer 1

You use Apache's .htaccess/mod_rewrite, and optionally a PHP file, which is the approach I like to take myself.

For the .htaccess, something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php

Then in your PHP file, you can do something like this:

The following should get everything after the first slash.

$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

You can then use explode to turn it into an array.

$split = explode('/', $url);

Now you can use the array to determine what to load:

if ($split[1] == 'home')
{
// display homepage
}

The array is starting from 1 since 0 will usually be empty.