How to get “extended” path info from URL in a plugin

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Working on a plugin that creates short codes to embed into a page.

I have permalinks set to “Post name”, so http://example.com/post-name/

I want to be able to pass additional information in the URL so the short code can use it, for example:
http://example.com/foo-page/bar-thing/
as opposed to ?name=value

On our dev servers, this works and I can do something like the following to get the value:

$url = home_url( $wp->request );
$page_id = $post->post_name;
$thing_pos = strpos( $url, "https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/" . $page_id );
$thing = substr( $url, $pos + strlen( $page_id ) + 2 );

$thing now equals “bar-thing”;

On some servers, however, I get a “That page can’t be found” message. (the page id is correct) I have compared the settings and I can’t find any differences in permalinks settings, etc.

All the servers are running 5.1.1

I’m sure I’m missing something obvious, but I’ve searched for a couple of hours and I can’t locate any info about this – I’m probably not using the correct search terms.

Any help would be appreciated.

Update 1

I’ve added the following code to my plugin php:

function custom_rewrite() {
    add_rewrite_tag(
        '%myid%',
        '([^/]+)'
    );
    add_rewrite_rule(
        '^category/([^/]+)/?',
        'index.php?pagename=mypage&myid=$matches[1]',
        'top'
    );
}
add_action( 'init', 'custom_rewrite' );

And I’m still getting a 404 when I go to “mypage” with anything following the pagename, like so: http://example.com/mypage/foo. http://example.com/mypage works fine and the plugin loads and executes.

Update 2

Been working on this all day, still can’t get it to work. The current code:

In functions.php

add_filter('query_vars', 'add_query_vars', 10, 1);
add_action('init', 'add_rewrite_rules');
function add_query_vars($vars) {
    $vars[] = "test"; 
    return $vars;
}
function add_rewrite_rules() {
    add_rewrite_rule('^category/([0-9]+)/?', 'category?test=$1', 'top');
}

In the plugin:

$test = get_query_var( 'test' );

When I go to this a URL like this: http://example.com/category?test=123 I get 123 in $test as expected. When I go to http://example.com/category/123 I get an error 404. I have updated the permalinks in wp-admin.

1 Answer
1

In reply to “Update 1“:

The code worked fine for me. So,

I’m still getting a 404 when I go to “mypage” with anything following
the pagename, like so: http://example.com/mypage/foo.

Because your RegEx pattern is ^category/([^/]+)/?, so the URL you should have visited is http://example.com/category/foo. But then, you shouldn’t use category because that “base” is used for category archive permalinks — unless of course you changed it to something like topics.

So you’d use ^mypage/([^/]+)/? and not ^category/([^/]+)/?.

However, you should know that the rewrite rule would conflict with pages which are children of the mypage page. I.e. If foo is a child of mypage, then mypage/foo would load the mypage page and not the child foo page.

In reply to “Update 2“:

When I go to http://example.com/category/123 I get an error 404.

Because WordPress treats the request/URL as a category archive request, so WordPress tries to load a category with the slug of 123 and when not found, the error 404 is thrown. But the $test (i.e. get_query_var( 'test' )) would actually give you the expected value which is 123 as in the above example URL. 🙂

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