URL rewriting in PHP without htaccess

Website is running on a web host where we don't have access to a .htaccess file. However, I want to do URL rewriting for user friendly URLs.

e.g. Original URL

www.example.com/file?q=name

expected URL

www.example.com/file/name

As other people said, just use links like /index.php/nice/looking/url.
The "index.php" in the middle of the URL might look a little strange, but I don't think it's possible to have it look better without .htaccess

Else, you could ask your hoster to redirect any URL to /index.php so that you can handle URL rewriting without having /index.php in your URL.

Then you can just use a regex match to detect what file to include.
preg_match('@[/]{1}([a-zA-Z0-9]+)@', $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"], $matches) ($matches will contain all "parts" of the url in an array)

Be careful with including the files, use a whitelist so you're sure nobody would be able to load internal files.

as Alix Axel suggested you can use

www.example.com/index.php/file/name

then you will use $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] to process the URL.