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I am working with the PHP explode function. This function is used to detect page URL.

In our website settings, the page URLs are:

  1. /app/home/ (Home page)
  2. /app/answers/list (Search list page)
  3. /app/answers/detail/a_id/309 (Answer detail page)
  4. /app/answers/list/session/L3NpZC9WVmpBQWlxaw%3D%3D

Currently, I am using the explode function to split up the strings and store them in an array. 

$currentLocation  =explode("/",$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);

Array ( [0] => [1] => app [2] => answers [3] => list [4] => session [5] => L3NpZC9WVmpBQWlxaw%3D%3D )

And then there are a lot of IF Else condition statement: 

if ($currentLocation [2]=='home')
        {
            $this->data['pageURL']=$currentLocation [2]; //Home directory
        }
        else if($currentLocation [2]=='answers')
        {
            $this->data['pageURL']= $currentLocation [4];
        }

I am wondering whether there is a smart way to achieve this. Thank you. the /app/ part of URL is always fixed, the rest will change.

Cheers, Qing

Blorgbeard
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QLiu
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2 Answers2

2

Look for Zend framework Router

Emmerman
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    Altough this can be considered as a correct answer, i'll give it a -1 because this didn't help the OP in any way. – fabrik Mar 31 '11 at 11:47
1

Generally when you've got a lot of if/else conditions like that, it would be more common to use a switch statement instead:

switch $currentLocation[2] {
    case 'home' : $this->data['pageURL']=$currentLocation[2]; break;
    case 'answers' : $this->data['pageURL']= $currentLocation[4]; break;
    default: $this->data['pageURL']= $currentLocation[4]; break;
}

It's neater than a bunch of elseif blocks, though it's not really much less code.

However in this case, I would say that you could probably achieve better results using a set of rewrite rules. You haven't specified it, but given the URLs you've described, it's possible that you're using mod_rewrite (or similar) in your server config to redirect the 'friendly' URL to the actual PHP page?

This is where I would suggest working. By using a set of mod_rewrite rules, you can have the PHP page receive normal $_GET variables.

mod_rewrite allows you to have URLs like /app/answers/detail/a_id/309, but the PHP program would receive it as if the user had typed in app.php?page=answers&section=detail&a_id=309. The rewrite rules are based on regular expressions, and you can make them quite complex, to allow for a variety of different URL formats.

If you implement that, you could probably throw away all the work you're doing in the program with explode() and then picking out the relevant bits of URL, and replace it all with about five lines in your server config (.htaccess).

Hope that helps.

Spudley
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  • I can not rewrite the URL structure. Since the vendor will not allow me to do that. Thanks Spudley. – QLiu Mar 31 '11 at 12:10
  • @QLui: That's a real shame, because it would be a better way of doing it. Are you sure about that though? It's a pretty common thing to do these days, and a lot of common packages rely on mod_rewrite for their friendly URLs (Drupal, Wordpress, etc etc etc etc), so I would expect any half-decent hosting vendor to allow you to do it. So if your hosting vendor doesn't allow you to use mod_rewrite then I'd say you're with the wrong web host! Time to find someone better. – Spudley Mar 31 '11 at 12:14
  • If this function runs every time page load, will it slow down the speed? – QLiu Mar 31 '11 at 12:16
  • not if you write it properly. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26559/any-negative-impacts-when-using-mod-rewrite – Spudley Mar 31 '11 at 12:19