Question

Alright, I give up. I just can’t quite wrap my mind around apache rewrites, I’ve looked through a lot of the stackoverflow suggestions and none seems to make sense to me.

So, I have a script that current renders content based on http://www.example.com/index.php?article=some-article-name

But, I want the user to think that page is www.example.com/section/some-article-name

I’ve tried using stuff like

# Turn on URL rewriting
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/section/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)$ index.php?article=$1

I discovered the answer thanks to the direction of all of these folks.

RewriteRule ^section/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ test.php?article=$1
RewriteRule ^section/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ test.php?article=$1

You need both to handle 2 different types of requests, ones with a / at the end and those that don’t.

Answer 1

You may want a simpler rule like.

 RewriteRule ^/section/(.*) index.php?article=$1

A name like some-article-name will fail because you won’t match the hyphen. If you want a limited regex try something like:

 RewriteRule ^/section/([-_.a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ index.php?article=$1

This will match ASCII alphanumeric characters along with punctuation most likley to be in the name.

Either of these rules will fail if you have parameters on the incoming request.