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I've seen this kind of 'format' on a lot of other community based websites and have always wondered how it is done. Basically my question is 'How does /users/9920018/elijah-pilcher work'.
What i mean by that is there a different directory for every user? i.e. /users/uid/ and how is it done.
At the moment I have a user database without anyway for the user to view their data, I know there's many ways to approach this but I would like to follow a common way (like stackoverflow).
I'm not looking for any code, just an explanation, if you need me to explain my question further just ask :). If this is a duplicate I apologize.
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These are called path parameters. In a nutshell, there doesn't have to be a 1:1 mapping between the URL and a directory on your server.
You could direct anything under yoursite.com/users/ to a single servlet (or PHP script), and use the integer after /users/ as the ID of the user you want to retrieve the information for.