Comments on: Beautifying URIs

By: paolo

paolo — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:14:10 +0000

Very useful. Thank you. I am trying Joshua’s suggestion for the moment.
I need to change the RewriteRule to:
RewriteRule (.+)/ $1?%1%2 [N,R,NE] (with a slash added)

But I wonder if it would be better to do it in PHP as the article suggests? And, if so, what is the best way of connecting the function above to the submit button on a form?

By: Joshua Ferraro

Joshua Ferraro — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:12:52 +0000

Of course, another way to remove empty parameters is with mod_redirect … here’s a recipe I’ve used with some success:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*?)(?:[A-Za-z0-9_-]+)=&(.*)
RewriteRule (.+) $1?%1%2 [N,R,NE]

By: 虚拟主机

虚拟主机 — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 08:00:30 +0000

Thanks for the information. This is very useful

By: Mark Nottingham

Mark Nottingham — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 20:20:53 +0000

Good stuff!

The only caveat I have is that some people will assume that because they have “pretty” URIs, they somehow have a more Web-friendly app. While the URIs look better, they don’t get other benefits like caching, because it’s still script-based, and doesn’t supply a validator for caches to reuse.

That isn’t to say that this shouldn’t be done, of course; only that more is needed to get parity with filesystem-based resource (which usually do supply Last-Modified, ETag, etc.).

shameless plug
One way to do this with PHP can be found at: http://www.mnot.net/cgi_buffer/
/shameless plug

Cheers,

By: gregR

gregR — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 16:17:23 +0000

Thanks for your rapid response Dom, I’ll try this tomorrow and give you the result.

By: dom

dom — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 16:04:50 +0000

Hi Greg, I’m not sure the example you give is really using hierarchical data, with the possible exception for “line” vs “bar” graphics. For this one, I would have my URIs generated à la http://www.example.com/graphics/bar?data=-10,16,2.5&height….
To that end, you could use the following rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule /graphics RewriteRule ^bar$ /generator.php?type=bar [P,QSA]
P here stands for Proxy (and will work only if Apache has mod_proxy available) and will thus hides the sub-request. QSA stands for Query String Appending, and means that the query string received on the original resource should be appended when the proxy-redirect is done.

By: gregR

gregR — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 15:24:58 +0000

Very useful Dominique, I’m sure that not every user of blogging softwares understands rewrtiting rules and how they works.

Now I have a question, I implemented a modified (simplified to be honest!) version of a web-service created by J. Gregorio : Sparklines : http://bitworking.org/projects/sparklines/
Sorry, no URI to provide because of a restricted access.

Written in php, it takes some GET variables to produce an image with gd, my uri’s are actually
http://www.example.com/generator.php?type=line&data=-10,15,2.5&height=15&step=4
for lines graphics and
http://www.example.com/generator.php?type=bar&data=-10,15,2.5&height=15&width_b=3&treshold=0&abovecolor=red&belowcolor=blue
for bar graphics

For every “type” of graphics, there are common parameters “data” and “height” and particular parameters :
“step” for the line “type”
“treshold”, “abovecolor”, “width_b” and “belowcolor” for the bar “type”.

It seems kind of hierarchical, but to use mod_rewrite, do I need to have several rewriting rules in the same .htaccess ?