HOWTO: Implement a URL Pattern Interpreter Similar to Django and RoR in PHP (Drop the .php With mod_rewrite)

About a month ago, I posted a quick update that dealt with an improved REST style URL pattern interpreter for my mobile blog, mark.kolich.mobi.  At the time, the enhancement was to convert the style of my mobile blog URL's from this:

http://mark.kolich.mobi/m.php?a=1

to this:

http://mark.kolich.mobi/m.php/1

This improvement was fairly easy to implement as I described here.  However, I realized today that I wasn't totally satisfied with this enhancement, given that the ".php" in the URL was still visible.  After a little investigation, I discovered that I could use Apache's mod_rewrite to make my mobile URL's look a little cleaner, like so:

http://mark.kolich.mobi/m/1

This URL style is much simpler and cleaner: I dropped the annoying query string, and I also got rid of the .php extension.  Implementing this was actually quite easy using mod_rewrite.  I simply used mod_rewrite to internally re-write any requests starting with "m" to the PHP script that serves up individual articles/posts on my mobile blog.  In my Apache httpd.conf file, I added the following:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/m /m.php [L]
RewriteRule ^/twitter /tw.php [L]

Any request starting with "m" will be sent to m.php.  Any request starting with "twitter" will be sent to "tw.php".  Check out my mobile blog to see this re-writing method in action.  The PHP code that parses the REQUEST_URI to determine what article to serve up can be found here.

Simple enough.  Enjoy.