Can mod_rewrite be done in PHP?

[spl1nter]

I want to be able to make my URL's look neater but I don't want to muck around with Apache and change the mod_rewrite.

Is there any way of doing this in PHP?

If not, can PHP come up with links like:

domain.com/section/topic/page

Instead of:

domain.com/section.php?topic=blah&page=blah2

Thanks.

[sad69]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by URLs looking "neater". Could you elaborate on that?

Also, if:
domain.com/section.php?topic=blah&page=blah2

is supposed to be replaced by:
domain.com/section/topic/page

Do you not lose the values blah and blah2? How do you plan to incorporate them?

If you're wanting to make your URLs neater in the sense that you don't have a bunch of parameters after the PHP file, then you may consider using POST instead of GET. GET will pass all the parameters from your form to the address bar as a URL, whereas POST will pass your parameters implicitly, and they will be available in the $_POST array.

So to get blah, you would use $_POST["topic"].

Hope that makes sense, hopefully someone else can assist you if need be.

Good luck,
Sadiq.

[missing-score]

you can use .htaccess files. Its very easy to do! take a look at http://www.codetricks.com/article.php?cat=&id=12

[spl1nter]

That article looks about right. Thanks

That's if I can persuade my host to let me have a look at the .htaccess

[brothercake]

nb - ForceType only works on Unix Apache, not Windows Apache.

[firepages]

ForceType does work on win32 (at least on apache2/XP/2K)

but if you are not allowed to modify your .htaccess file you can still use search-engine friendly URL's although they then end up looking like ..

domain.com/section.php/var1/var2

I then use the contents of $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] to work out the passed data though $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] works just as well.

beware relative links in your code when using such techniques !, e.g. in the page shown by the sample url above , './images/img.gif' will no longer be valid ... though '../../images/img.gif' will be , so use absolute paths where you can or design a prefix system for your relative links ..
'<?=$DEPTH;?>images/img.gif';