Setting up a bunch of short/friendly redirect URLs

Question

I need to setup hundreds of short redirect URLs which follow this format:

http://mysite.com/shorturl

which will redirect to

http:

Answer 1

Is there a reason why you didn't want to do something like making

http://mysite.com/shorturl

redirect to

http://mysite.com/index.php?id=shorturl

And index.php can look up the correct id in the database from the shorturl and do the right thing.

Obviously, to do this, all you'd need is one line in your .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^([A-z,0-9,_,-]+)/?$    index.php?id=$1 [PT]