A PHP question help

Coding Help
1

How can I do in php to detect the id of a user in a link for example:

facebook.com/092439542392435555

and return on the page the details about that account

2

If you are not using routing in php, I would reccomend you use “get” requests in the url. For example, instead of:

example.com/id/283493248923489234

You would want to use:

example.com/id?id=283493248923489234

To “capture” the value of id in php, you would want to use the $_GET variable. If you have a page called id.php and it contains this code:

<?php

echo $_GET["id"];

Somebody who visits /id.php?id=123 would see 123 on their screen.

3

One way you can handle requests like that is using a .htaccess file with a RewriteRule.

The exact rewrite route depends on how you are going to set up your routes. However the most basic would propably be:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [L, QSA]

The first part, ^(.*)$, is a regex that is being matched against the request path.
The second part, index.php?url=$1, is where the request will be redirected to. The $1 is the result of the first (and in this case, only) capturing group. The result of a second capturing group would be called $2, and so on.
The last part, [L, QSA], is a list of flags. L indicates that it is the last applicable rule, and QSL indicates that any query string should be appended to the new path. E.g. domain.com/123?key=value would become domain.com/index.php?url=123&key=value.

The above will redirect all requests to your index.php file. You will then be able to access the url query parameter using:

$url = $_GET['url']

// you can then use if / switch to process different url values

If you know that the id will only contain numbers, and you want a seperate file to handle the request, you can use the following:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)$ user.php?id=$1 [L, QSA]

This will redirect requests like domain.com/1234 to user.php, but will leave other requests unchanged (e.g. domain.com/abcd). In this case you would use $_GET['id'] to get the id number.

1 Like
4

Just note that this assumes you are using the Apache web server; this will not work if you are not using the lamp-poc project on glitch.