Question

I have a problem that I cannot wrap my head around.

I’m using Apache and PHP

I need to get:

http://localhost.com/cat_ap.php?nid=5964

from

http://localhost.com/cat_ap~nid~5964.htm

How do I go about changing that around? I have done more simple mod rewrites but this is slightly more complicated. Can anyone give me a leg up or point me in the right direction

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^/cat_ap~nid~(.*)\.htm$ /cat_ap?nid=$1 [R] 

The [R] at the end is optional. If you omit it, Apache won’t redirect your users (it will still serve the correct page).

If the nid part is also a variable, you can try this:

RewriteRule ^/cat_ap~([^~]+)~(.*)\.htm$ /cat_ap?$1=$2 [R] 

EDIT: As Ben Blank said in his comment, you might want to restrict the set of valid URLs. For example, you might want to make sure a nid exists, and that it’s numerical:

RewriteRule ^/cat_ap~nid~([0-9]+)\.htm$ /cat_ap?nid=$1 

or if the nid part is a variable, that it only consists of alphabetical characters:

RewriteRule ^/cat_ap~([A-Za-z]+)~([0-9]+)\.htm$ /cat_ap?$1=$2