Question

I currently have a .htaccess file set up with this rule:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ user\.php?user=$1 [L]

which works as expected:
mysite.com/joe becomes mysite.com/user.php?user=joe

How could I change the regex to include periods in a possible username?

For example I would like
mysite.com/joe.bloggs to go to mysite.com/user=joe.bloggs

Currently this brings up a 404 missing page error.

I have tried ^([a-zA-Z0-9\._-]+)$ user\.php?user=$1 [L]
But this produces an internal error 500 (I think this is due to an infinite loop: user.php is designed to redirect to the homepage if no user is specified.)

I’m pretty new to all of this (regex especially). Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

First check if the requested URLs is not a file or folder. This will prevent the redirect loop for URLs like /user.php

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-.]+)$ user.php?user=$1 [L,QSA]