php/.htaccess help

[MrMean]

Hello - I know the title wasn't useful didn't know what to put it as, anyway.

I'm just about to start developing my new lyrics script, which is going to be Search Engine friendly.
So, instead of having ?page=blah&artist=blah etc I would like to have

domain.com/artist
domain.com/artist/the-song-name

I need to make this dynamic, is there a way it can be done with .htaccess?

Thanks in advance for anyhelp!

[LazyJim]

mod_rewrite should help, redirect all requests to your domain to a signle php script that reads the URL requested and does whatever you want with it.

An alternative if you're too lazy to figure out mod_rewrite like I was, set the ErrorDocument to your php script so any request resulting in file not found will redirect to the same php script that reads the url. This is a pretty sneaky solution but the main drawback is the server will try to find the requested document each time, a step that is bypassed if you use mod_rewrite instead.

I recommend downloading Apache and PHP and installing on your own machine to test them, it's a great time saver and usefull experience.

[Jim]

ISAPI Rewrite might also be useful if you're working on Windows platform. It's the IIS version of mod_rewrite.

[MrMean]

thanks for your replies, but i've read up on mod rewrite now and its ideal for what im doing