Question

I have successfully created rewrite rules to handle URLs like

http://example.com/xyz

http://example.com/xyz/

http://example.com/xyz/abc

http://example.com/xyz/abc/

Here is the mod rewrite & regex:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^/?([0-9]+)(?:\/)?$ /index.php?p=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/?([-a-zA-Z0-9_+]+)(?:\/)?$ /index.php?n=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/?([-a-zA-Z0-9_+]+)/([-a-zA-Z0-9_+]+)(?:\/)?$ /index.php?n=$2 [L]

This works great, but the problem is that when I go to http://example.com/xyz/abc, my script gets the correct input (n=abc) but the paths are messed up, so all relative URLs in my code are broken, as they are now relative to xyz instead of the root.

Is there a way around this at all? As you can see above I have tried to redirect to /index.php to force the path to be correct. My brain is fried after a long day of regex and code, so I hope it’s not something disastrously trivial.

Answer 1

The three options are:

1) Use a base tag (this will affect every relative URI on your page, including links, images, scripts, stylesheets and so on)

<base href="http://yoursite/">

2) Change all of your links to fully qualified URIs

<a href="http://yoursite/yourpage.html">

3) Use the “/” prefix to show that the path is relative to the root on each URI.

<a href="/yourpage.html">

I have personally used the base-tag option the most, which does get some bad press (from people that have used it without really understanding it). When it comes to mod_rewrite, the base tag is perfect as you probably DO want all your paths to be relative to the root, including all your images, css, scripts and links.