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How to remove file extensions from URLs
26 July 2006
URLs should be treated as prime real estate. Their primary purpose is to locate resources on the Internet. So for a web developer, it makes sense to make things as user-friendly as possible. One effort is to remove the extensions from files. I don’t mean things like .html or .pdf, as those give you an idea that you’re reading a page of content or a PDF document. I meant things like .php or .asp or .pl, etc. These are unnecessary items that just clutter the location bar on most browsers.
There are two ways to do this. The easy way which just looks at a request, if the requested filename doesn’t exist, then it looks for the filename with a .php (or .asp or whatever) extension. In an .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L,QSA]
Now if you go to: http://domain/about the server will interpret it as if you went to http://domain/about.php.
Makes sense, but if we’re already breaking the relation between URL and filename, we may as well break it intelligently. Change that .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
Now if you go to: http://domain/about the server will interpret it as if you went to http://domain/index.php?q=about. How is this useful? Well now index.php is always called, so it can do anything common to all pages (which might be nothing) and do something based on the $_GET['q'] variable.
For example:
require_once('html_functions.php');
switch ($_GET['q']) {
case 'about':
echo myhead('about page');
break;
default:
echo myhead('home page')
break;
}
include($_GET['q'] . '.php');
echo myfoot();
We’re loading a hypothetical library html_functions.php which contains some simple functions (myhead() and myfoot()) that print out a simple header or footer for this site. The switch statement dynamically sets the <head/>. After the switch we include a file based on the query string. In our case it will still pull up about.php. Granted, this is not what I use personally, but it’s the general idea behind how symfony works.
Why?
So why go through all this nonsense? Extensions for the most part don’t mean much to an end user. Sure, jpg, png or gif mean images and html mean web page and pdf means the file is a PDF document. Dynamic pages, however usually come from cgi, php, pl , asp pages or some other 3 or 4 letter extension that the server uses as a hint to determine how to parse, but the output is usually html. Servers are smart though. They don’t need hints, and the above code eliminates the need to reveal so explicitly just how a page is delivered. Take our restaurant review site, for the most part you can’t tell that it’s done in php. In fact all the URLs are “clean” and somewhat logical. The benefit of having clean simple URLs is if we decide to change from PHP to ASP for example, we won’t need to change our URLs.
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