Custom urls - giving each user a url

Question

I am building a website and I would like to customize the users\' profile so their profile url shares their name. For example, the website domain would be www.example.com an

Answer 1

I really can't justify using htaccess for something like this. I only use htaccess to route everything through one php file (my root index.php) and let php sort out how to handle the url. For example, you could do this:

$uri = trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/');
$pieces = explode('/', $uri);
$username = $pieces[0];

Then do something with $username.

The way I parse and use my url's is a bit more complicated than this, but it wouldn't be relevant to your question. Just make sure whatever you do is able to account for any possible query strings, etc.

mod-rewrite is not great for performance, so I wouldn't abuse it.

Updated based on your comments.

Here's just a slight expansion on my original code sample:

//.htaccess - route all requests through index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(png|jpe?g|gif|css|js|html)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [L]

and this is an example of what you could do in index.php:

$pieces = preg_split('-/-', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], NULL, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$username = $pieces[0];

include "users/{$username}.php";

Now you could visit mysite.com/myUserNameHere, the request goes to index.php which parses out the username and includes a file for that user.

That takes care of the routing just like you asked. I said that my routing is more complicated, but my use is a lot more complicated, so it isn't relevant. I only warned that my code here doesn't account for a url with a query string attached, like "mysite.com/someUser/?foo=bar". It's a simple process to parse the url without the query string and you should be able to handle that. If you need further assistance parsing the url, then make a post asking about that.