Question

I have in my .htaccess the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?([^/\.]+)/?$ $1.php [L]
RewriteRule ^/?([^/\.]+).php$ $1/ [R,L]


RewriteRule ^/?([^/\.]+)/?$ $1.php [L] is working fine. What this is doing is taking a url like http://www.example.com/whatever and making it read the page as http://www.example.com/whatever.php.

However, what I’d like to be able to do is take a url like http://www.example.com/whatever.php and automatically send it to http://www.example.com/whatever, hence the second line of the code. However, this isn’t working. What its doing now, is as soon as it comes across a link ending in .php, the url becomes http://localhost/C:/Sites/page/whatever/, and pulling a 403: Forbidden page.

All I want to know is what I can to so that http://www.example.com/whatever.php will be read as http://www.example.com/whatever, and that if http://www.example.com/whatever.php is entered into the URL bar, it will automatically redirect to http://www.example.com/whatever.

Does that make any sense?

EDIT

Ok, so it appears I wasn’t all too clear.. basically, I want /whatever/ to read as whatever.php while the URL still stays as /whatever/, right? However, if the URL was /whatever.php, I want it to actually redirect the users URL to /whatever/, and then once again read it as whatever.php. Is this possible?

Answer 1

If you’re rules are inside an .htaccess file, you can omit the leading slash when you match against a URI:

RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ /$1.php [L]

Also note that a leading slash is included in the target (/$1.php), this makes sure /whatever/ gets rewritten to /whatever.php. When you redirect, if you are missing this leading slash, apache prepends the document root to it. Thus /whatever.php gets redirected to the document root C:/Sites/page/whatever/. Even if you include the leading slash, this will never work because you’re going to cause a redirect loop:

1. Enter “http://www.example.com/whatever.php” in your address bar
2. apache redirects you to “http://www.example.com/whatever/”
3. apache gets the URI whatever/ and applies the first rule and the URI gets rewritten to /whatever.php
4. The URI gets put through the rewrite engine again
5. the URI /whatever.php matches the second rule and redirects the browser to “http://www.example.com/whatever/”
6. repeat steps 3-5

You need to add a condition that the actual request is for /whatever.php:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST|HEAD)\ /([^/\.]+)\.php
RewriteRule ^ /%2/ [R,L]

So altogether, you’ll have:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ /$1.php [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST|HEAD)\ /([^/\.]+)\.php
RewriteRule ^ /%2/ [R,L]