如何绕过文件夹和子域并使用PHP在同一个域中打开它？

Question

I have a domain.com and I want to show different languages. At entrance, the PHP identifies the visitor's country and includes a translation file.

When a user wants to change the language, he selects from a drop down the desired language.

So, what I want is to get them to the domain.com/uk for example if he chooses English language.

The problem is that I do not want to create any subdomains or folders, because it looks for a dir. What I will do is to take the uk and run an if statement, and load the appropriate translation file.

How can I cheat the browser NOT to look for a folder, but open me the same page?

Also I do not want to use domain.com?uk or anything related.

UPDATE

I want to omit the ?

<?php 
session_start(); 
if(isset($_GET['link'])) {
    $_SESSION['started'] = true;
}
?>

<a href="?link"> LINK </a>

Answer 1

Use .htaccess to achieve this.

Be sure mod_rewrite is available and create a file called .htaccess in your root path.

 Options +FollowSymlinks
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteRule ^(uk|jp|au|etc) handler.php?language=$1

The result here will serve any explicitly named path like /uk with handler.php?language=uk