I have a semi-professional website about my travels where I present all the pictures for each country.
For that I have a MySQL-Database containing the following attributes: - country - country-id - pictures (links)
I am using a PHP-file which requests the pictures: "country.php"
So I get the URL-Structure: www.url.com/country/spain/ or www.url.com/country/usa/.
What I need is to change the URL Structure to www.url.com/spain but still maintain that "central" country.php-file.
I know a method which only works, when I have a folder for each Country in my webspace and an index.php-file which simply loads the country.php-file (I did that on another website). But in this case I would have way too many folders, which makes it all too complex since there are not only countries but also "special places and cities".
Is there another way to do that?
EDIT: I got it with this code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-/]+)$ country.php?url=$1
But now the problem is, that whatever I type in, eg. www.url.com/xyz, the server thinks that I want to open the country "xyz". What can I do, to only rewrite, when the entered country is in my database?.
I am sorry if I ask too complicated, but I just didn't know how explain my problem better.