php - htaccess url rewrite (db access)?

Question

I have a web page with the following parameters.

http://www.somesite.com/community_details.php?comm_id=233&region_id=2&city_id=40

I would like it changed to this

http://www.somesite.com/virginia/fairfax/some_community/

How do I call db to return region, city, community for a url rewrite in .htaccess?

Answer 1

It's not particularly efficient, but you CAN use a RewriteMap to use an external txt/dbm/program to let mod_rewrite do lookups and rewrite based on the results.

RewriteMap pretty-community prg:/path/to/some/shell/script

RewriteRule community_details.php?(.*) ${pretty-community:$1}

The captured query string from the community_details.php script would be passed to the specified external script on its stdin, and the script replies with the rewritten url via its stdout.

Note that the script is started ONCE when Apache first fires up, and then essentially runs in daemon mode, communicating with Apache for every rewrite performed. Since PHP isn't particularly suitable for writing daemons, you might want to do this program in some other language.