Create Short Url

[riderz]

Let's start off by making a .htaccess file in your project folder on your server (for me, it will be: C:\wamp\www\cleanURLs\.htaccess). In that file, we will put the follow code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
RewriteBase /cleanurls/

RewriteEngine On turns on the rewrite engine for Apache. This will allow us to modify the URL requests once they come in.
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-/]*?)$ index.php tells Apache to pass every request that has alphanumberic characters, underscores, dashes, and slashes through index.php.
RewriteBase /cleanurls/ tells Apache where to start the rewriting. If you are not using this .htaccess file in a subdirectory, you can remove this line.

Now, on to the PHP!

After we have create our index.php file, place the following code in it:

<?php
$request = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; //This grabs the page requested. It should look something like this: /cleanURLs/user/tim
$filename = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']; //This gets the script name. It should look something like this: /cleanurls/index.php
$request = substr($request, strrpos($filename, '/') + 1); //This removes the string /CleanURLs/ off the beginning of the request. It is not needed.
while(substr($request, -1) == '/')
  $request = substr($request, 0, -1); //This removes all the trailing slashes off the request. It helps clean up the request.
$request = explode('/', $request); //We then explode the request by the slash. You can then calculate which page the user is requesting
foreach($request as $key => $value)
  if($value == '')
    array_splice($request, $key, 1); //Removes any empty items. This is caused by double slashes in the URL

print_r($request); //This will show us all the parameters passed in the URL

if there are a prob

Delete or comment out the print_r($request); line.