Parsing the 'q' in drupal to get the current URL

Question

So I am attempting to parse out the URL, so that I can get a specific page template to be used for a specific URL; if the URL is example.com/team, then use page-team.tpl.php.

However, when I do this, the URL I am getting (via $_GET['q']) always seems to be the URL from where I was, not the one where I am currently at. If I directly navigate to example.com/team/surf, it gives me "team/surf"; if I go to example.com/team it gives
"team/surf." If I refresh the page, it will then give me the desired one.

I dropped this code into my template.php file.

function theme_preprocess(&$vars, $hook) {
  switch ($hook) {
    case 'page':   
      $normal_path = trim($_GET['q'], '/');
      $path_alias = drupal_get_path_alias($normal_path);
      $alias_parts = explode('/', $path_alias);

      if (($alias_parts[0] === 'team') && (count($alias_parts)) == 1) {
       $vars['template_file'] = 'page-team';
      }
      break;
    }

Do you have any idea on what is going on here?

Answer 1

I'm not sure why your code happens to fail in some cases, and in some cases not. But what I would try is replacing that code with the provided by Drupal arg function.

On "team/surf", arg(0) will return "team", and arg(1) "surf". This is what I use myself, and hopefully that will solve the problem for you.

Answer 2

There is no need to parse the $_GET['q'] yourself.