Question

I have the following .htaccess Rewrite rule below which works for converting virtual directories to parameters, for example:

www.example.com/usa/ny/nyc gets interpreted by PHP as www.example.com/index.php?path=usa/ny/nyc.

What I can’t seem to figure out is how I would change my regex below to handle parameters of the virtual directories themselves. For example, I want:

www.example.com/usa/ny/nyc/?display=off&settings=none to be seen by PHP as www.example.com/index.php?path=usa/ny/nyc&param=display:off,settings:none.

What makes it extra tricky is that the parameters won’t always be those two options I used in the example above, they will change dynamically. Any ideas or suggestions of how to go about accomplishing this?

RewriteRule ^/?([a-zA-Z_\-/]+)$ index.php?path=$1 [L]  

Answer 1

Assuming you want to pass the query string unmodified, you can use the [QSA] (query string append) option like so:

RewriteRule /(.+)$ /index.php?path=$1 [L,QSA]

You can find the documentation for the QSA option here. From the docs:

With the [QSA] flag, a request for /pages/123?one=two will be mapped
to /page.php?page=123&one=two. Without the [QSA] flag, that same
request will be mapped to /page.php?page=123 – that is, the existing
query string will be discarded.

So, your PHP script will see all the parameters as standard _$_GET parameters, rather than needing to do any other modification.

If you would prefer to treat the result more like a typical path element, you can use the following:

RewriteRule /(.+)$ /index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

In the above case, your query string will still be appended, however you will need to handle the path explicitly using $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].