Perfection is elusive :-)

If I understand your question, you want to know how to construct paths from db entries chosen from a cgi query. That is just a matter of building up a string. Select the db rows that match your query, according to your rules, and build the paths from the results.

From your example data, it looks like the path is built from a db record as "$course/$week/$id.$ext". Is the Type associated to the particular url?

If the url is significant to the search, consider making a directory for each, and putting a DirectoryIndex /cgi-bin/searchscript.pl line in each directory's .htaccess file. the searchscript.pl file can grab the url it was called under.

I'd like to see your whole design, what you show here seems slightly clunky.

After Compline,
Zaxo