Pretty URL with 2 variables

I'm in the process of rebuilding a couple of results/detail pages on ten of our client's websites. This is a 'people' page with a list of staff which then links through to a further details page. Currently the URL for the details page is as follows:

https://www.sitename.co.uk/people2?Name=firstname&Surname=surname

I'd really like to make the URLs SEO-friendly:

https://www.sitename.co.uk/firstname-surname

I found a Mod Rewrite generator here: https://www.generateit.net/mod-rewrite/ and it gave me the following htaccess code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^-]*)-([^-]*)$ /people2?Name=$1&Surname=$2 [L]

I copied that into my very lengthy htaccess file and it didn't work - if I try to access the pretty link I just get a server error. I know this is really outwith your remit but thought you might know what I'm doing wrong as you're generally very knowledgeable? I've attached the text of the htaccess file for info - the new line is at the bottom.

Maybe try changing it to:
RewriteRule ^([^-]*)-([^-]*)$ /people2.php?Name=$1&Surname=$2 [L]

and move it up to right after this line:
RewriteRule ^ https://www.edinburghtherapy.co.uk%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,L,R]

Sadly that didn't work - it actually redirected every link on the site to an empty people page!

If you give me FTP access and a sample url then I can take a look.

That would be great - details in PM.

The issue is that you have some pages or folder names with dashes... so it can't tell if it is a first and last name, or one of your existing pages.

I updated the mod rule to use double dash between the name and that seems to work:

That's fantastic thanks, it put me on the right path. I've amended it further because a few people had hyphenated surnames, so I changed the delimiter to an underscore. It now reads as follows:

RewriteRule ^people/([^_]*)_([^_]*)$ /people2?Name=$1&Surname=$2 [L]

which gives the following URL:

https://www.mydomain.co.uk/people/Name_Surname

I would like to take this one step further as some people have double-barrelled names with spaces, for example:

https://www.mydomain.co.uk/people/Leonardo_Da%20Vinci

should be

https://www.mydomain.co.uk/people/Leonardo_Da_Vinci

I used a str_replace in the URL on the results page like this:

a href="/people/<?php echo str_replace(“ “, ”_”, ($rsPractitioners->getColumnVal("Name"))); ?>_<?php echo str_replace( " ", "_", ($rsPractitioners->getColumnVal("Surname"))); ?>>"

However I can’t figure out how to alter the recordset on the details page to accommodate this.

<?php
$rsPractitioners = new WA_MySQLi_RS("rsPractitioners",$PowerCMSConnection_i,1);
$rsPractitioners->setQuery("SELECT * FROM practitioners WHERE practitioners.Name = ? AND practitioners.Surname = ?");
$rsPractitioners->bindParam("s", "".$_GET ['Name'] ."", "-1"); //ParamName
$rsPractitioners->bindParam("s", "".$_GET ['Surname'] ."", "-1"); //ParamSurname
$rsPractitioners->execute();
?>

I tried the following but it doesn’t work:

<?php
$rsPractitioners = new WA_MySQLi_RS("rsPractitioners",$PowerCMSConnection_i,1);
$rsPractitioners->setQuery("SELECT * FROM practitioners WHERE practitioners.Name = ? AND practitioners.Surname = ?");
$rsPractitioners->bindParam("s", "". str_replace(" ", "_", "$_GET ['Name']") ."", "-1"); //ParamName
$rsPractitioners->bindParam("s", "". str_replace(" ", "_", "$_GET ['Surname']") ."", "-1"); //ParamSurname
$rsPractitioners->execute();
?>

You are separating with an underscore, so it isn't going to work if the first name has a space. However it should work with the last name. You would have to change your htaccess rule to:

RewriteRule ^people/([^_]*)_([^\/]*)$ /people2?Name=$1&Surname=$2 [L]

Then your recordset parameters would be:
$rsPractitioners->bindParam("s", "". $_GET ['Name'] ."", "-1"); //ParamName
$rsPractitioners->bindParam("s", "". str_replace("_", " ", $_GET ['Surname']) ."", "-1"); //ParamSurname