PHP 404 Redirecting

[0x416C616E]

Hello,

First off, if this topic is posted elsewhere on the site, sorry. I searched through 9 similar topics, but none answered my question.

I read that a "fix" to the problem that some search engines have with a dynamic page could be solved with a 404 error redirect. For example, instead of somepage.php?category=cars&name=mustang you could link to a nonexistant page of /cars/mustang/somepage.php. When the server doesn't find that page, it redirects to the page set in .htaccess, and you can explode the referring URL.

The tutorials I read said to use

$url = explode("/",$REQUEST_URI);

but this wouldn't work because $REQUEST_URI is delivering the 404.php and any variables after the? (which are what I want to avoid). So I tried

$url = explode("/",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

and its not picking up the referer at all.

Is this because of a variable set in php.ini or httpd.conf. Or do the server variables for my browser get reset when apache redirects through .htaccess, or maybe something else?

Thanks

[jamie]

hi,

AFAIK this will make it very difficult to track down real 404 errors, because every page request will be logged as a 404 in the access_log.

we use a rewrite rule to do something similar, by appending the non-existant SCRIPT_URL to our page generation script:

RewritEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ html.php/$1 [L]

in html.php we explode the SCRIPT_URL to get the params to query the db.

this also doesn't work too well with the access_logs, as no page is ever actually logged as a 404. to get round this, if the db query returns no results, we manually send a 404 header and 404 page and write to our own error log.

HTH

[RonPK]

If possible, you're better of using mod_rewrite to achieve what you want. Smart search engines don't index pages that return a 404 error ;)

Anyway, when I define an error page on my server like this in .htaccess or httpd.conf:
ErrorDocument 404 /error/404.php
, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] contains the non-existent URL, not the 404.php. So I wonder whether you're using the ErrorDocument thingy?