Can you capture the following parameters in PHP without the use of mod rewrite?
www.example.com/index.php/p1/p2/p3
I know you can't not do the below with php alone
www.example.com/p1/p2/p3
does it make any difference whether the file name is in the URL?
I'm not sure I completely understand what you're trying to do, but the explode function can convert the URI to an array, then you can do whatever you need to do with the array elements.
If you want to make one URI appear as another without mod_rewrite, you can't do that because it's Apache and not PHP that determines the resource to return based on the request.
$bits = explode("/",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
echo $bits[0]; //www.example.com
echo $bits[1]; //p1
echo $bits[2]; //p2
echo $bits[3]; //p3
Yes, having the file name in the URL let's you capture the URLin PHP5, that's how frameworks work when mod_rewrite is not enabled
You can then read the URL parameters using:
echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];