How to ignore 'en' portion in URL - multi-language website

Question

I am creating a multi-language site which uses a portion of the URL to determine the language, and dynamically fills the page with content using a PHP array. I do this so every language has it's own url:

 https://website.com/en/home.php
 https://website.com/nl/home.php

The issue in this case is that when accessing the english website using https://website.com/en/home.php, the site tries to open the file located at the folder:
(root) / > en > home.php

While the file is actually located at:
(root) / > home.php

Is it possible to "ignore" the language portion in the URL when opening HTML file, but without redirecting so the user still sees it when they navigate to a page.

I tried using the <base> html tag, this did not work.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

To create a router you can follow the tutorial here

You will specifically need to change your .htaccess file to contain

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php [QSA,L]

This will redirect all requests to index.php

index.php will need to contain:

<?php

$request = $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'];

switch ($request) {
    case '/' :
        require __DIR__ . '/home.php';
        break;
    case '/en/home.php' :
        require __DIR__ . '/home.php';
        break;
    case '' :
        require __DIR__ . '/home.php';
        break;
    default:
        require __DIR__ . '/404.php';
        break;
    }

This way all requests which are redirected to index.php will show a particular page based on the request url according to what you specify in this router.