Rewrites all url requests to index.php and stores the path in the url variable which is being processed into $uri variable (to prevent empty values).

simple_url_routing.php

//.htaccess code

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [L,QSA]

//PHP part

// extracts the path from url and stores it in $uri   
if (isset($_GET["url"]))
	$uri =  substr_count($_GET["url"], "/") >=1 ? explode("/", $_GET["url")) : $_GET["url"];
else
	$uri = "/";