A super-simple, intuitive router created using PHP and Regular Expressions. This router is ideal for APIs, where SEO is not a priority, as well as for simple personal projects to clean up your project folder. It is not recommended to use this router on a production website for obvious reasons.
Include the router.php file, with include, include_once, require, or simply by pasting the Router class in your file. The .htaccess file redirects all traffic to the specified routing file. This file is where you will create a new Router and add routes.
When the file is requested by the browser, by navigating anywhere in its direct parent folder (with the current .htaccess file), the router will create the new Routes specified by the user, set the variables specified in the path, and include the requested file. It is important to understand that the Router includes the files. Take this simple file for example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
...
<body>
<header>
<nav>
<a href="/" title="Home">Home Page</a>
<a href="/about" title="About">About Us</a>
</nav>
</header>
<?php
include "./lib/router.php";
$router = new Router();
$router->newRoute("/post/[id]", "./post_by_id.php", "get");
$router->route();
?>
</body>
</html>With this example, the file ./post_by_id.php must not contain the html, body, and head tags from a typical HTML document, as those were already defined in the template.
In the file that .htaccess points to, initialize a new instance of the Router object:
$router = new Router();Next, you will create all the routes that you wish to have. A new route is created as follows:
$router->newRoute("/posts/{page}", "./posts_page.php");This code will create a new route with a "variable" that will be captured by the router. In this case, if a user navigates to https://yoursite.com/posts/2, the router will create a new variable, $page and set it equal to 2. It will then include the file that you specified to maintain the variable that was defined.
A required variable is denoted in the path as [varName]. If a required variable is not defined in the request, the router will not include the file specified by the route. For instance: the routing path "/users/[id]" will NOT work with the URL http://yoursite.com/users/. Required variables CANNOT follow optional variables in the path
An optional variable is defined in the path as {varName}. If an optional variable is not defined in the request, the router will define the variable as null and still include the file specified by the path. For instance: the routing path "/posts/{page}" will work with the URL https://yoursite.com/posts/ OR https://yoursite.com/posts/3.
This router supports rudimentary variable types. As of now, you can define a variable as an any type by not designating a type at all, an int type by following the variable name with :int, or an alphabetical type (only supporting the characters A-Z) by following the variable name with :a-z. Because this router works with Regular Expressions, these types are matched to the following RegEx patterns:
No Type: [^\/\?#\s]+
Int Only: [0-9]+
Alphabetic: [a-z]+
Here are a few examples for routes containing variables with types:
$router = new Router();
$router->newPath("/profile/[handle:a-z]/{tab:a-z}", "./profile.php");
$router->newPath("/posts/{id:int}", "./post.php");
$router->route();