Heidegger has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,

My perl CGI URLs have the following form: 
http://www.mywebsite.com/user.cgi?user=jack

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I need to rewrite the URL to be something like: 
http://www.mywebsite.com/users/jack

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Or I have to make it more user-friendly in one way or another.

Could someone please point me to a useful Perl or Apache Module for making this? Or maybe someone is using their own technique of handling this?

Thank you very much

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Re: URL rewriting
by valdez (Monsignor) on Apr 01, 2004 at 13:16 UTC

    You can use mod_rewrite as suggested by maa; see also URL Rewriting Guide. If you want to use mod_perl, see Using mod_perl to rewrite URLs. If you want to roll your own, you can do something like this inside your user.cgi:

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
use URI;

$q = CGI->new;
$user = $q->param('user');

$uri = URI->new;
$uri->scheme('http');
$uri->host('www.mywebsite.com');
$uri->path("/users/$user");

print $q->redirect( -uri => $uri->as_string );

exit;

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    Ciao, Valerio

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Re: URL rewriting
by maa (Pilgrim) on Apr 01, 2004 at 09:03 UTC
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Re: URL rewriting
by saintbrie (Scribe) on Apr 02, 2004 at 04:03 UTC
    Since I can assume you are using apache, I know this will work: If "/user" is executable, when the browser calls /user, /jack will be in the PATH_INFO environment variable, which you can use raw $ENV{PATH_INFO} or you can get at using CGI.pm (or other modules): 
    use CGI;
$C = CGI->new();
$temp_user = $C->path_info();
$user = "";

# for taint checking
if ($temp_user =~ /^\/(\w+)/) {
     $user = $1; 
}
# do something with $user here
# which if called as /user/jack will be "jack"

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