adding location as subdirectory to url with mod rewrite? - url

Question

I working on project that displays item according to the location. First time user has to pick a location in order to search for an item. This location is saved as cookie for future reference. The url looks as following:
www.example.com/newyork
If the user is looking at an item that exists in New York, the url for that item is:
www.example.com/item/iphone
Above url works fine but there is one problem. If the above url is forwarded through an email to a first time user, This item does not exist because the location is not selected. I could forward user to different page to select location and then look for the item, but this is hassle for the user. So, I would like to change above url to
www.example.com/newyork/item/iphone
so that way I could use New York as location. How do I add a non-existing sub directory to a url? Canthis be done with PHP or done with mod_rewrite?

Answer 1

You can try doing a redirect, but you'll have to carefully craft the regular expression used to match /newyork/item/iphone. Then you can group out the newyork part and set a cookie and redirect the browser using the CO flag.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/?([^/]+)/item/([^/]+)$ /item/$2 [L,R,CO=location:$1:example.com:/]
This will take a request like http://www.example.com/pittsburgh/item/iphone and extract the pittsburgh part, store it in a cookie named location (with the domain=example.com and path=/), then redirect the browser so the cookie gets stored by the browser and make the browser go to http://www.example.com/item/iphone
See the documentation for the CO flag for details about the syntax:
[CO=NAME:VALUE:DOMAIN:lifetime:path:secure:httponly]
Quick question. The acutal link without mod_rewrite rule is www.example.com/item.php/itemid=phone. Is it possible to rewrite this link to www.example.com/newyork/item.php/itemid=phone
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/?([^/]+)/item.php/itemid=(.+)$ /item.php/itemid=$2 [L,R,CO=location:$1:example.com:/]