database calls with no ? in URL

i have a database driven site i currently pass a variable value in the url like this: http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/bio/member.php3?mbrsurname=Addley this allows my script to make calls to the database the ? makes most crawlers skip these urls i want these pages crawled. i need to turn the variable into a file name. i want: http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/bio/Addley.php3 or http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/bio/member.Addley.php3 i also have articles which are called with urls like: http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/news/read.php3?id=119 i want: http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/news/read.119.php3 or http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/news/119.php3 or http://ndpcaucus.sk.ca/news/federal.transportation.reforms.announced. php3 (the title with spaces replaced with dots) a quick kludge in my current thinking is to have the script which creates the db record create a file called Addley.php3 which contains the variable to be passed, eg: <? $mbrsurname = 'Addley'; include ("member.php3"); ?> but, i think that is messy. i don't want to do it that way. it is not elegant. there is a way to create file names on the fly. i just don't know it. eg: http://www.php.net/manual/function.fputs.php http://www.php.net/manual/html/function.fputs.html help -- James M. Burton Bus. 306.569.7790 mailto:jburton@bfsmedia.com Fax. 306.949.0430 Internet Information Services 2132 Broad St. BFS Media Group Inc. Regina, SK http://www.bfsmedia.com/ CANADA S4P 1Y5 "When you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not, this is called dying ground" - Sun Tzu, The Art of War