Question

I am migrating from a zeus platform to apache and having problems with the following rewrite:

/12345-somepage.html
/event.php?ref=12345

This is the .htaccess

RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule    ^/([0-9]*)- /event.php?ref=$1 <-- This doesn't work 404 not found
RewriteRule    ^otherpage.htm  index.php?Month=0&Category=otherpage <- This one works

This is the exisiting Zeus rewrite rule:

match URL into $ with ^/([0-9]*)-
if matched then set URL = /event.php?ref=$1

I have verified that the target address works i.e. /event.php?ref=12345

Answer 1

Your default RewriteBase is /, that’s why you dont match a leading /, set the RewriteBase to prevent unexpected behaviour, add modifier [L] so Apache stops processing the following rewrites after this matched, add [QSA] to append a query string from the original url

This works:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule    ^([0-9]+)- /event.php?ref=$1 [L,QSA]

my event.php

<?php 
echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
echo "\n";
print_r( $_GET ); 
?>

The output

# curl -i http://localhost/1234-mypage.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 22:57:28 GMT
Content-Type: text/html

/event.php
Array
(
    [ref] => 1234
)