Processing URL parameters - name value pairs separated by slashes

Question

I want to have URLs like :-

URL 1 -    www.projectname/module/search/param/1
URL 2 -    www.projectname/param/1/module/search

I want a PHP code which takes the above URLs as parameter and returns an array like

Array("module" => "search", "param" => 1) (for URL 1)
Array("param" => 1, "module" => "search") (for URL 2)

So that I can use the result as $_GET in my project. I came to know that it would be better and easier to do this with PHP than with htaccess rewrite rules. If you can help with rewrite rules also please help.

There can be any number of parameters.

I got this idea from CodeIgniter's URL handling library. But my project is not on Codeigniter so I cant use that library. Any standalone code to do that?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Here's a function to do the job. Note that I've filled out the URLs, as parse_url needs the scheme. It will also fail on seriously malformed URLs.

function get_dispatch($url) {
    // Split the URL into its constituent parts.
    $parse = parse_url($url);

    // Remove the leading forward slash, if there is one.
    $path = ltrim($parse['path'], '/');

    // Put each element into an array.
    $elements = explode('/', $path);

    // Create a new empty array.
    $args = array();

    // Loop through each pair of elements.
    for( $i = 0; $i < count($elements); $i = $i + 2) {
        $args[$elements[$i]] = $elements[$i + 1];
    }

    return $args;
}

print_r(get_dispatch('http://www.projectname.com/module/search/param/1'));
print_r(get_dispatch('http://www.projectname.com/param/1/module/search'));

Here's the result:

Array
(
    [module] => search
    [param] => 1
)
Array
(
    [param] => 1
    [module] => search
)

However, this probably is not very robust. If there is a well written library out there that already does the job (like the one suggested by Itay Moav), then you should definitely look into it.

Answer 2

Use php explode function. You will have to parse the result and see if the $result1 is a valid module in your application an so on. The logic of the parser should belong to your application. Zend_router that somebody mentioned does the same thing by trying to map to an existing module/controller/action whatever $request object it has.

$result = explode('/', $string);

Answer 3

Use the PHP function parse_url http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php

$url = 'http://username:password@hostname/path?arg=value#anchor';

print_r(parse_url($url));

Array
(
    [scheme] => http
    [host] => hostname
    [user] => username
    [pass] => password
    [path] => /path
    [query] => arg=value
    [fragment] => anchor
)

So you can then analyse the path section of the array.

You cold then use explode to put items into an assoc array?

Answer 4

$url    = parse_url('http://www.projectname.com/module/search/param/1');
$params = explode('/', trim($url['path'], '/'));
$params = array_chunk($params, 2); //tricky part here
foreach($params as $param)
{
    $final_params[$param[0]] = $param[1];
}

edit: parse_url works with correct URLs only

array_chunk is a nice function for this task :)