How to Dynamically Rewrite a URL like Facebook

Question

I\'ve written my site using PHP and unfortunately the Artist profiles are currently like this:

website.com/profiles.php?id=xxx

That way I can GET the id and

Answer 1

If you do not want the ID in the URL, the artist names need to be the new ID and thus unique.

In that case you can do the following in the .htaccess file in your document root directory to rewrite / internally to /profiles.php?name=:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)$ profiles.php?name=$1

Here the artist name is also restricted to only consist of alphabetic letters. For other characters (especially . and /) you should take into account not to allow values that conflict with existing files (e.g. profiles.php). And if you derive the URL artist names from their real names, make sure not to allow conflicts either. In that case you will still need the artificial ID to make the URL path unique.