URL Segment Variables
ExpressionEngine provides an easy way for you to access the information in your URL segments. By "segments", we mean the segments of the URL that appear after your index.php page. For example, this URL has two segments:
http://www.example.com/index.php/products/shirts/
products is Segment 1 and shirts is segment 2
If needed, you could access the values of either of those segments using these variables in your templates:
{segment_1} or {segment_2}.
Up to 9 URL segments can be accessed using the following variables:
{segment_1}
{segment_2}
{segment_3}
{segment_4}
{segment_5}
{segment_6}
{segment_7}
{segment_8}
{segment_9}
Segment variables let you dynamically change aspects of your templates based on what appears in the URL.
For example, imagine you use an ExpressionEngine weblog to store information about each employee in your company. Each weblog entry describes a different person, with the URL Title of the entry being the person's name. In this scenario you could use a single template to dynamically show each employee's information based on what is in the URL. Consider this URL:
http://www.example.com/index.php/company/employees/joe/
The Template Groups name is "company" and the Template name is "employees". Based on the information in the 3rd segment (in this case, "joe") you can dynamically cause the "employees" template to change for each person. Here's an example of a weblog tag in which the URL title changes based on the 3rd segment:
{exp:weblog:entries url_title="{segment_3}"}
<h1>{title}</h1>
<p>{body}</p>
{/exp:weblog:entries}
User Guide Contributions Feed
User Contributed Notes
I also found this forum thread helpful when I went looking for a way to use a SEGMENT value as a way to display content from a specific field that had the same Short Name.
For example, given a field with the short name “yaddayadda”, and a URL such as www.domain.com/whatever/yaddayadda/howzit/, you can use {{segment_2}} in the Weblog Entry loop to display the contents of the field “yaddayadda”.
This is very helpful for when you’re building dynamic elements such as sidebars, footers, subnavs, etc., based on URLs, and where you want to be able to reuse Templates across many different Sections of a site without requiring the client to create a separate entry for each custom URL or Section.
Note that capitalizing the “if” (e.g. {IF ... } {/IF}) may cause errors.
Note also that segment variables can be combined with native EE conditional variables to control content display in a template, e.g.:
{if segment_2 == ''}... content ...
{if:else}
... other content ...
{/if}
This is useful when you want, say, and index page page of a weblog (with 10 latest entries as summaries) to display from the same URL as the full text of the entry itself. That is, ‘example.com/blog/’ is the front page whereas ‘example.com/blog/entry-title/’ displays a single post from the same template.
(cf. Conditional Variables)
My favorite tip is that you can access segments earlier via PHP, which means you can write different weblog:entries tags in one template depending on URL context:
<?
global $IN;
$seg1 = $IN->fetch_uri_segment('1'); // these are interchangeable
$seg2 = $IN->SEGS[2]; // these are interchangeable
if ($seg2 != '' && $seg1 == 'foo') { // limit sub pages to 25 items
?>
{exp:weblog:entries limit="25"}
<? } else { // but the main page shows only 5
?>
{exp:weblog:entries limit="5"}
<? } ?>
(Thanks, Derek Derek Derek for the tutorial.)
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