Question

a short question about optional regex:

imagine a given page thats currently rewritten/beautified to:

/xx/somepage/description-description-description

while actually loading the ugly url below water:

/somepage?ln=xx

via this seemingly working rule:

RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/(.*)/(.*?)$ /$2?ln=$1 [L]

However, currently the last portion /description is now compulsory. Without it error 404 occurs. What RewriteRule should I use to make the third and last part optional? Especially since it has no file-fetching meanings and is only for the user to make a url more descriptive.

In other words, I would like all three of the below to work the same way:

/xx/somepage
/xx/somepage/description-description-description

thanks very much

update

both of these seem to work fine:

RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/(.*?)(/.*)?$   /$2?ln=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/([^/]+)(/.*)?$ /$2?ln=$1 [L]

the difference being on the the middle part. I gather it has something to do with greedyness… but why/how they differ exactly… someone else might be able to shed light here.

Answer 1

Remove the final / in your rule, or place it in an optional group. As it stands, and from what I see, the description isn’t completely necessary, but a trailing slash is.

New RegEx:

RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/(.*?)(/.*)?$ /$2?ln=$1 [L]