Hypergeneric +PHP Fancy Hidden Extension Technique+ Media for the Masses

The PFHET in Action!

The first thing you need to do is dump your $_SERVER object and have a look to see what you can work with. Obviously we want to do as little work as possible. So, here is a list of all the objects in my $_SERVER object:

UNIQUE_ID			phzNdNBxlBIAAEBLfR8AAAAJ
SCRIPT_URL			/corpus/PFHET/some/fancy/query/string
SCRIPT_URI			http://www.hypergeneric.com/corpus/PFHET/some/fancy/query/string
HTTP_HOST			www.hypergeneric.com
HTTP_USER_AGENT			CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)
HTTP_ACCEPT			Accept: application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE			en-us,en;q=0.5
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING			gzip
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET			ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
HTTP_CONNECTION			close
HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL			no-cache
HTTP_PRAGMA			no-cache
PATH			/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
SERVER_SIGNATURE			
SERVER_SOFTWARE			Apache/2.0.61 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.61 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2
SERVER_NAME			www.hypergeneric.com
SERVER_ADDR			208.97.191.152
SERVER_PORT			80
REMOTE_ADDR			38.103.63.62
DOCUMENT_ROOT			/home/reductio/hypergeneric.com
SERVER_ADMIN			webmaster@hypergeneric.com
SCRIPT_FILENAME			/home/reductio/hypergeneric.com/corpus/PFHET
REMOTE_PORT			40625
GATEWAY_INTERFACE			CGI/1.1
SERVER_PROTOCOL			HTTP/1.1
REQUEST_METHOD			GET
QUERY_STRING			
REQUEST_URI			/corpus/PFHET/some/fancy/query/string
SCRIPT_NAME			/corpus/PFHET
PATH_INFO			/some/fancy/query/string
PATH_TRANSLATED			/home/reductio/hypergeneric.com/some/fancy/query/string
PHP_SELF			/corpus/PFHET/some/fancy/query/string
argv			Array
argc			0

So, looking at this, the server is doing all the work for me. Clearly, PATH_INFO is perfect as it has everything right after the "action" filename. Now, don't get your hopes up. It usually isnt quite this nice. You may find that you will need to do a little string magic with the REQUEST_URI and the PHP_SELF.

So, my "query" then is:

/some/fancy/query/string

The code looks like:

$query = $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"];

Another thing to consider, if you plan on using relative urls (like in the head), if you plan on using forward-slashes in the url, the html page that is rendered uses the path of the search bar to determine the relative paths. So, inherently, it won't work. You'll have to use a bit of php again to figure out how many directories the page will think it's ahead, and then create a variable you can echo. For example: for the query you've posted to this page i am prefixing all my relative urls with:

../../../../

The code looks like:

$directories = count(explode("/", trim($query, "/")));
$fileroot = "";
for ($i=0; $i<$directories; $i++) $fileroot .= "../";

Then you just put this everywhere you have a url:

<? echo $fileroot ?>

Makes sense? I think it's actually pretty easy. The only other thing you have to do, of course, is create a .htaccess file. Oh, and prey that the installation of Apache you are running allows them. The .htacess file for getting this page to work is:

<Files PFHET>
	SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

Now get out there and start cleaning up those URL's! Hide that .php shit and the ?'s and whatnot. You haven't lived until you have parsed your own PFHET query!