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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T01:10:04+00:00

I am trying to use mod rewrite to remove and replace part of my

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I am trying to use mod rewrite to remove and replace part of my url. I am looking to get my urls looking like this.

http://domain.com/e813c697e8dd8dc2bbfecb1d20b15783.html

instead of 

http://domain.com/lookup.php?md5=e813c697e8dd8dc2bbfecb1d20b15783

lookup.php calls matches the md5 to the database and fetches and forwards you to the correct url.
All I need to do now is rewrite it so that it rewrites from this

http://domain.com/lookup.php?md5=e813c697e8dd8dc2bbfecb1d20b15783

to this

http://domain.com/e813c697e8dd8dc2bbfecb1d20b15783.html

I have tried this which works but it makes rewrites from any .html page at root level and makes it display nothing “blank”.

RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9]+)\.html$ /lookup.php?md5=$1

Can anyone tell me a way to do this so that my regular html pages are not messed up and be able to display these links how I want to? Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your current rule is a way too broad. You need to make it more specific to only match md5 hash value — which is easy:

    RewriteRule ^([a-f0-9]{32})\.html$ /lookup.php?md5=$1 [QSA,L]

    1. Your pattern for file name is too broad — it will match any file with letters and digits. md5 hash, on another hand, uses very limited subset of characters (a-f only) and digits .. and has to be 32 characters long. This pattern ([a-f0-9]{32}) does the job perfectly.

    2. I have also added L and QSA flags (QSA to preserve any existing query string (like, tracking info, for example) and L to stop matching any other rules).

    3. To further ensure that it does not match any real files which may have name in such format (who knows), add RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f line before the rule.

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