SE friendly mod_rewrite question

"Simple" issue, hard to find answer

[profitblaze]

First of all thanks for all the helpful advice.
It's great to have a site like this to turn to for help.

My question is this (I think this idea would be valuable for many):

I would like to have members of my affiliate program be able to promote a more SE friendly URL like:
http://example.net/4/admin

instead of http://example.net/x.cgi?id=admin

Is there a way to setup a rewrite in the "4" directory to automatically insert the "x.cgi?id=" before the affiliate code?

I have been searching all over the net all day and finally found your site. Can you help?

Sincerely,
Mark Kessler

[edited by: jdMorgan at 4:31 am (utc) on Mar. 17, 2005]
[edit reason] Obscured specifics. Please see TOS. [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

Mark,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

See the phrase "back-reference" in the RewriteCond and RewriteRule sections of the Apache mod_rewrite documentation. Also see the Apache URL Rewriting Guide for examples. Links to both of these resources are available in our forum charter [webmasterworld.com]. This site uses the same technique to make the forum threads appear with static URLs.

Jim

[profitblaze]

Thanks jdMorgan,
I finally got ahold of the guy that made this work for him.

Here's his response:

The shortening of the url is done by using .htaccess redirection normally reserved for 404 error management.

To setup such a redirection. Create an .htaccess file and enter the following lines in it. You will notice that instead of using the ErrorDocument command, I've made use of mod_rewrite That's because IE browser has a problem making such redirection if you use the normal ErrorDocument 404 code.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
RewriteRule ^(.+) redir.cgi

Next, create a redir.cgi file and enter the following lines in it:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$affiliateid = $ENV{'REQUEST_URI'};
$affid = $affiliateid;
$affid =~ s/\/(.*?)\///g;

print "Location: [example.net...]
exit;

Next, ftp into your hosting account and upload the .htaccess file and redir.cgi in the same folder in ASCII mode. You can upload the files in your public_html folder directly and your member links will then be [example.net...] (where X will be the member's id). Or you can create a sub-folder (go for example). Then your links will be [profitblaze.net...] (where X will be the member's id).

Chmod redir.cgi to 755

Thanks again for your help!

[jdMorgan]

If your friendly URLs always start with the "4/admin," I think there's a simpler answer:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{1,3})/admin /x.cgi?id=$1 [L]

Unless you have other unspecified requirements, that does what you said you needed to do.

There's no need to create or call any external scripts or to do an external redirect which "exposes" the unfriendly URL, given your initial requirements.

The "{1,3}" allows for one- to three-digit id numbers -- you can change this to suit your needs.

Jim