Question

I have the following in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase / 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ page.php?query=$1

however no matter what i type into the url, $1 is always equal to page.php

What I Expect to happen:

myurl.com/test   >> myurl.com/page.php?query=test

What is happening:

myurl.com/test >> myurl.com/page.php?query=page.php

Answer 1

You likely have 2 redirects taking place. page.php itself is being redirected to page.php?query=page.php. You need to exclude it from the redirect. Better yet, exclude all real existing files and directories. Also, add [QSA'] to append any additional querystring params, as well as[L]` to stop processing any further rewrites that may come later in the file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase / 

# if the request is NOT for a real file or directory
# (page.php is a real existing file)
# do the rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ page.php?query=$1 [L,QSA]