parameter passing by HTTP GET request other than as query parameters- slug/cleanurl/prettyurl

Question

Note: The URL, code used here is only for demonstration purpose of my example.

I have seen that, For a HTTP GET request, if you want to pass a value for decision making, it is NOT passed through query String parameters for some good reasons.

Lets' say there's a thumbnail image showing a bookstore in houston location, say " ABC Bookstore " The href attribute of that image is assumed as below

domain.com/texas/abcbookstore-houston

This is what is needed, and the page shows the book store details, instead of the URL being shown as domain.com/texas/details.php?id=1

Question:

Any ideas how the URL is analysed to fetch the key? One website when I looked at Network tab of Chrome, it showed

Request Headers
:authority:www.domain.com
:method:GET
:path:/texas/abcbookstore-houston

My thoughts:

I can extract the last word after parsing the complete URL, and I get ' abcbookstore-houston '

Code I tried:

$url = "domain.com/texas/abcbookstore-houston";
$path = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH);
//echo $path;//// prints "/texas/abcbookstore-houston"

$parts = explode('/', rtrim($path, '/'));
$id_str = array_pop($parts);
echo $id_str; // prints abcbookstore-houston

My thinking is that we can have one more column in the main bookstore table called ' nameofid ' and a query will fetch the ' id ' whose ' nameofid ' matches. nameofid in this case is " abcbookstore-houston ".

Summarized Question: Is this a correct approach? I have seen that in many of the websites, they no longer pass the query parameters even if that's a GET request, instead the URL looks clean like in this use-case.

Answer 1

As @charlietfl mentioned, I was actually looking at Clean URLs also called Pretty URLs

This is the actual book store details page

http://www.domain.com/texas/details.php?id=1

Basically this should be

http://www.domain.com/texas/details.php?id=abcbookstore-houston

I wanted this to be displayed in the address bar as

http://www.domain.com/texas/abcbookstore-houston

Finally, I found out the solution by making the below changes in .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(?:texas/)?([^/]+)/?$ details.php?id=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

The final command can be replaced by

RewriteRule ^texas/([^/]+)/?$ details.php?id=$1 [NC,L,QSA]

if ' texas ' is mandatory and not optional .

So what is actually happening here is when I search for this URL http://www.domain.com/texas/abcbookstore-houston , the server is actually routing to http://www.domain.com/texas/details.php?id=abcbookstore-houston while we see only http://www.domain.com/texas/abcbookstore-houston in the address bar.

So inside details.php we can get the id using $_GET["id"] and continue our business logic.

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Additional Notes:

If the objective was http://www.domain.com/abcbookstore-houston then the RewriteRule would be

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ details.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]

Here's more explanation about the command used

• RewriteEngine On turns the engine on.

• RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f does not rewrite anything if the request filename exists, and is a file.

• RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d does not rewrite anything if the request filename exists, and is a directory.

• RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ details.php?id=$1 [L,QSA] This is the actual rewrite rule. It takes anything after the domain name (anything other than forward slashes), and rewrites it to details.php , passing it as the id parameter.

• RewriteRule ^texas/([^/]+)/?$ details.php?id=$1 [NC,L,QSA] This is the actual rewrite rule. It takes anything after {the domain name followed by the string ' texas '} (anything other than forward slashes), and rewrites it to details.php , passing it as the id parameter.

Note:

The technical term for word used in this use-case abcbookstore-houston is slug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug

A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a page using human-readable keywords.

To make the URL easier for users to type, special characters are often removed or replaced as well. For instance, accented characters are usually replaced by letters from the English alphabet; punctuation marks are generally removed; and spaces (which have to be encoded as %20 or +) are replaced by dashes (-) or underscores (_), which are more aesthetically pleasing.