"imitation" folders in url

[pghcollectibles]

whether you have links or forms sending variables to a page, the url will show: page/?variable=something&another=something_else etc...

ive looked at redirect and htaccess and neither seem to be the answer for my question (if its even possible) i will give an example of what i want to do:

<a href="<?php echo $folder1; ?>"><?php echo $folder1; ?></a>
<a href="<?php echo $folder2; ?>"><?php echo $folder2; ?></a>
<a href="<?php echo $folder3; ?>"><?php echo $folder3; ?></a>
<a href="<?php echo $folderetc; ?>"><?php echo $folderetc; ?></a>

i want the url to appear as if thats where you are (even though those folders will not exist) but you are actually going to:

page/folder/index.php?url=1
page/folder/index.php?url=2
page/folder/index.php?url=3
page/folder/index.php?url=etc

can this be done?

[pghcollectibles]

i have found these for htaccess but i dont know what they actually mean. the first is for file the second is for directory

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule http://www(.*)\.htm$ /folder/index.php?url=$1

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule index/(.*)/(.*)/$ /folder/index.php?$1=$2

i wouldnt know where to put them as i would like folder1, folder2 etc. to not have to exist.

some kind of super form-php-htaccess code

[studio]

If I am understanding you correctly, Apache's mod_rewrite is just what you're looking for. Your second post is an example of this.

The basic concept is this: if you have a long and complicated URL with a bunch of GET variables, you can tell Apache to map some other, simple URL to the exact same page. Apache uses regular expressions to do this.

Example:

RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)$ /$1.php?var1=$2&var2=$3&var3=$4

This Rewrite will "redirect" a URL request such as

www.host.com/script/var1/var2/var3

to

www.host.com/script.php?var1=var1&var2=var2&var3=var3

The user will still see www.host.com/script/var1/var2/var3 in their address-bar.

To make this work, simply put your rewrite rule (and perhaps the RewriteEngine On) directive in your .htaccess file (located in /home/username/public_html/.htaccess)There are some good tutorials out there, one I've found useful is at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting .

[pghcollectibles]

ive read that article and ive downloaded a cheat sheet from another site which looks useful. i will be learning more on this very soon, but...

i was wondering if you can rewrite to another url completely. i want to make a couple rules so i can type for example:

http://www.mysite.com/google and the page shown will really be http://www.google.com

then i can make a different page that will have links to:

/google
/mail
/accounts
/etc

instead of using my bookmarks, and my url address box will always have mysite/whatever_im_working_on

could someone post the code just for the basic function im describing with the google redirect as an example

[pghcollectibles]

as a test i put this into the .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.google.com/ [L]

it redirects but i thought htaccess can be used to mask the url address bar i must have missed that part and i hate to reread all those pages again if you are using htaccess for search friendly urls then i would think it would have to mask or the user would hit bookmark and it would be the long url still.