PHP redirect to another website

Question

I have a directory named "goto" and a file inside called index.php. Currently the following is inside the index.php file:

<?php
$url = $_GET['url'];
header("Location: $url");
?>

At the moment to redirect to another URL I have to type this into the address bar:

http://mysite.com/goto/?url=http://google.com

I would appreciate it if you could tell me how I could change that URL so that I could redirect the user to a website by typing this into the address bar:

http://mysite.com/goto/http://google.com

Answer 1

Use mod_rewrite and .htaccess to rewrite http://mysite.com/goto/http://google.com as http://mysite.com/goto/?url=http://google.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^goto/(.+)$ /goto/?url=$1 [L]

Depending on your server configuration you may need to include a / in your rewrite path (i.e., ^/goto/(.+)$).

Answer 2

Unless you want to become a malware hub, I would wholeheartedly recommend you not doing this.

If you wish to allow redirect in such a manner, using http://mysite.com/goto/google and then work out the domain from a whitelist of available, allowed, destinations.