How to change my id and name in php url

Question

How would I change the URL from

from: example.com/games.php?id=27

to: website.com/games/271/game-name-here

So far I have this in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^games/([0-9]+)/?$ games.php?id=$1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*).aspx$ $1.php
RewriteRule ^(.*).ashx$ $1.php
Options -Indexes
<Files 403.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Options -Multiviews

Answer 1

As I understand, you want requests for the following URL website.com/games/271/game-name-here to be handled by games.php

For this, you may use a simpler rule.

RewriteRule ^games/(.*)$ /games.php?var=$1 [L]

This will send all requests with /games/ to games.php. For e.g.

/games/271/game-name-here will go like this /games.php?var=271/game-name-here

Now, game-name-here is only for SEO purpose as what you actually need is only the id. So, filter the id part from the var like this -

$value=($_GET['var']);
$temp = explode('/',$value);
$id = $temp[0];

Remember, htaccess is used only for handling the URL requests. You still need to form the correct URLs in your webpages.

Additional Tip: You may also consider the following URL structure website.com/games/271-game-name-here . Here just explode the URL on a hyphen '-' instead of '/'

Answer 2

Basically you need to do two things :

1. .htaccess to decode the url and send it to abc.php
2. You need to change the file that create the URL. If the page that refer to abc.php?vid=55 is index.php, you need to change your code in index.php

For example:

old program

$query = "SELECT id,title FROM vid_table";
$result = mysql_query($query);

while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
    echo '<a href="abc.php?vid=' . $data['id'] . '">' . $data['title'] . '</a>';
}

new program

while ($data = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
    echo '<a href="abc.php/vid/' . str_replace(" ", "-", $data['title']) . ">' . $data['title'] . '</a>';
}

In abc.php you need to change the way the program read from the database

/* this means that the page get redirected from .htaccess */
if (isset($_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'])) 
{
    $parts = explode('/', $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL']);

    array_shift($parts);

    $url_name = $parts[1];
    $url_name = str_replace("-", " ", $url_name);
    $query = "SELECT id FROM vid_table WHERE title = '$url_name'";
    $result = mysql_query($query);
    $data = mysql_fetch_array($result);
    $_GET['id'] = $data['id'];
}

Then you can continue with your program and can go to second step and URL rewriting.

More information:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/introduction-to-url-rewriting/

I hope it's not too confusing.