I am a pretty skilled programmer, but when it comes to RegEx and rewriting, I am a total n00b. I want to convert a URL from
http://www.example.com/lookup.php?id=1
to
http://www.example.com/lookup/1/item/
where "item" refers to the name of an item in a database that is being looked-up.
I'm using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to convert the URLs so they are SEO friendly.
Simple .htaccess example:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^lookup/([a-z0-9\-]+)/item/?$ /lookup.php?id=$1
</IfModule>
This will match any alphanumeric (also will recognise dashes) string of any length as the 'id'. You can limit this to just numeric by changing the regex to ([0-9]+).
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^lookup/([a-z0-9\-]+)/([a-z0-9\-]+)/?$ /lookup.php?id=$1&view=$2
</IfModule>
This one will match /lookup/123/some-text/ to /lookup.php?id=123&view=some-text
Take a look on htaccess rewrite urls! :)
Here's your example:
RewriteRule ^lookup/(\d+)/(.*)$ /lookup.php?id=$1&name=$2
When you access lookup/123/my-product/, it'll call the lookup.php?id=123&name=my-product file internally.
Do you want to redirect from the old URL to the new? Or are you looking to read in those "friendly" URLs and then have them behave like the old URL?
If it's the latter, try taking a look at Net_URL_Mapper as a way to parse and redirect those links fairly easily.
