Can I re-write my URLs like this and is it a good idea?

Question

Is it possible to re-write (Apache Mod-Rewrite) a URL from this: `http://www.example.com/view.php?t=h5k6` to this `http://www.example.com/h5k6` The reason for this re-write is that the URL needs to be very short (a bit like a tiny URL service). Would that new URL still hit my view.php page? Would it be able to still make use of the super global array GET (`$_GET`) to access the variable `t`? I still want my index.php page to map to this http://www.example.com. I would also appreciate comments on effects this may have as I am a bit of a noob. :) Thanks all

Accepted Answer

The terminology of mod-rewrite works the other way. Requests would come in like this `http://www.example.com/h5k6` and would be rewritten to `http://www.example.com/view.php?t=h5k6` internally. That way your PHP scripts can respond to the requests as if they were sent as GET parameters, but users see the URLs in a much friendlier way.

So you don't have to change any PHP scripts, and you can still access the parameter `t` from the GET array.

In your case, the rule would look like this:

```
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /view.php?t=$1
```

You might want to be more specific about what you accept (instead of just the catch-all `.*` expression). Also, you might want exceptions to this rule if you have other pages in this directory other than view.php.

Can I re-write my URLs like this and is it a good idea?

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