Question

I want to create functionality similar to the site downforeveryoneorjustme.com. They use a pretty URL to take in the URL of any given site. I sure they use htaccess to do this, however the method i’m using is encountering problems.

This is my .htaccess file that I’m using to send the site URL to a file.php:

RewriteEngine on

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

RewriteRule ^(.+)?$ /file.php?var=$1

However when I type in something like
mysite.com/http://google.com the variable it sends the file is http:/google.com (missing a slash). I can’t figure out why this is occurring.

Also, when I type in something like mysite.com/existingfolder, where existingfolder is a folder on my site, it always works incorrectly. The variable it passes to the file is missing.html instead of existingfolder. In this case, the file doesn’t display images. The image can’t be found, and i’m assuming its because it’s searching for the image in an incorrect folder on the site. That it might think it’s in existingfolder and not in the normal folder it should be in.

Does anyone know why I’m getting these problems? I’m knew to htaccess, and I’m assuming it has something to do with that.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I sure they use htaccess to do this

I’m not. I’m not even sure they’re using Apache.

mod_rewrite is not always the answer to all URL-processing problems. It’s certainly prone to some of the quirks of path-based URL handling, including the removal of double-slashes.

I suggest reading the Apache-specific REQUEST_URI variable from your script, rather than relying on rewrites to get a parameter. This will give you the path requested by the browser without any processing.