Rewrite url with id and title (php) - php

Question

How to rewrite url (what to do) so that instead:
http://www.example.com/article.php?id=123
it says:
http://www.example.com/articles/123/article_title_read_from_database
using php and mysql
Thanks.

Answer 1

When the example article.php well page is accessed with the GET of id=123, the php code to retrieve the number is
$my_id = $_GET['id']
, in this case, that would produce 123.
Then you can redirect the page using
header('Location: http://example.com/articles/$id/other stuff');
I'll leave the MySQL stuff for someone else, but a simple tutorial will give you alot of info on that.

Answer 2

To process request and redirect to new url:
// get id of record from URL
$id = (int) $_GET['id'];
// suppose connection to database is established already
$result = mysql_query("SELECT `title` FROM `articles` WHERE `id` = $id");
if (!$result) {
// there is no such an article
// you can redirect to some other page, or show some error message
} else {
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
$title = $row['title'];
$urlPart = generateURL($title);
header('location:/articles/$id/$urlPart');
exit;
}
you'll need generateURL function, that take string input and replace all unusable characters with _. (For example if you have title "What's going on?" it will replace ', ? and whitespaces to something like "what_s_going_on"). You can use str_replace or preg_replace to achieve this.
If you want to generate new URL on multiple places, you can insert URL form of title directly into database as another column title_url and then just select it and use it instead of title:
SELECT `title_url` FROM `articles` WHERE `id` = $id
There is no way you can do this kind of rewriting in .htaccess as you can't connect to database server from within this file. (Or at least I don't know such a solution)