Grab end of url server side [closed]

Question

If I have a user accessing my site for example: www.example.com/testpage.html, is there any way to grab the "testpage.html" as a string if the testpage.html doesn't exist? (I want to make custom 404 error messages..Basically I want when the user goes to a page that doesnt exist, say "This page [pagename] doesnt exist" and display a search result with the pagename as the query.)

Answer 1

Generally if you want to do anything useful with dynamic content, you're going to need some sort of interpreted language to provide the logic. As you did not specify, I assume you'll be using PHP.

In the case of PHP, you have access to the $_SERVER superglobal which, among other bits, exposes REQUEST_URI (e.g. $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) which is exactly what you are looking for. You can then build some logic in your PHP script around this variable to do actions based on specific matched URIs.

Example:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == "/testpage.html") {
  // Do something here
}

You could, of course, also get fancy with regular expressions, case statements, etc.

Answer 2

It sounds like your real question is "How do I make a custom 404 page", yes? That's going to be web server dependent.

As to extracting parts of the URL, if you're using PHP then you want the parse_url() function. In Perl, you'd use the URI module