.htaccess - PHP URL Rewrite

Question

i have a url like this.

http://www.somesite.com/community.php?id=4

for id number 4 would equal Washington for id number 5 would equal Denver for id number 6 would equal New York

I would like the url to be rewritten like this.

http://www.somesite.com/washington  for id = 4
http://www.somesite.com/denver for id = 5

is this possible?

How would I go about doing it?

Answer 1

Have a look at mod_rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

You can, for example, do it like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule washington community.php?id=4 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule denver community.php?id=5 [L,QSA]

This would, of course, lead to a LOT of rewrite rules if you have much cities. So, a IMHO smarter way would be to rewrite the URI slug to community.php and lookup the ID from some sort of database:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCOnd %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule /?([a-z-]+) community.php?city=$1 [L,QSA]

HTH