php - clean URL

Question

I want to create a web site with pure PHP. I want to hide the url parameters. I.e. I want to make my web site with clean urls. Is there is any way to do this with out using

Answer 1

First of all: It is not possible with PHP only (at least not the forms of URL I think of when reading clean URL). The web server needs to know how to handle requests and what requests are meant to be passed to your PHP script. Otherwise you will probably just get a 404 response.

Because the default behavior of a web server is to just take the requested URL path and try to map it to an existing file below the document root. If a corresponding file was found, either the file’s content is passed back to the client or – as in case of PHP files – the file’s content is passed to an appropriate interpreter and the returned data is passed back to the client. And if the file was not found, well, it responds with the status code 404. So at some point you need to configure your web server.

But after that, when the request was passed to your PHP script, you sure can use just PHP to establish clean URLs. And I would rather suggest to do that with PHP than with web server utilities. Because your PHP application should know best how to handle a requested URL.

In PHP, all required information are in the $_SERVER variable:

• $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] holds the requested URL path and query (you can parse that with parse_url), and
• $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] holds the PATH_INFO if you’re using that (see Apache’s AcceptPathInfo directive).