Question

I’m having a difficult time getting into using mod_rewrite. I’ve been at this for about an hour googling stuff but nothing quite seems to work. What I want to do is change
example.com/species.php into example.com/species
and also
example.com/species.php?name=frog into example.com/species/frog.

Using

Options +FollowSymlinks  
RewriteEngine on  

RewriteRule ^species/(.*)$ /species.php?name=$1  

I can get example.com/species.php?name=frog to display as example.com/species/frog, and with

RewriteRule ^species/ /species.php  

I can get example.com/species.php to display as example.com/species/, but I can’t get both of them to work at the same time.
Also, example.com/species with no trailing slash always comes up as a 404.
I’ve considered just making a /species/ directory to catch any problems but I’d rather just have a few rules for one species.php file. Any help would gladly be appreciated!

Edit (because I can’t answer my own question for 8 more hours):

I seem to have fixed both of my problems. I changed my .htaccess to:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^species/(.*)$ /species.php?name=$1 
RewriteRule ^species/?$ /species.php 

The second RewriteRule successfully redirects example.com/species to example.com/species.php while leaving the other RewriteRule working at the same time.
However, if I typed in example.com/species/ with a trailing slash, it was being read as example.com/species.php?name= and would throw an error because no name was submitted, so I just added

if(isset($_GET['name']) && empty($_GET['name'])) {header('location: http://example.com/species');}  

so that if I used example.com/species/ it would redirect to /species and work as desired.

Answer 1

If you change the * (match zero or more) to a + (match one or more) in your first RewriteRule then you should stop seeing species.php?name= if a trailing slash is used.

This is because the + will require that something appears after the slash, otherwise the rule will not match. Then your second RewriteRule will match because it ends with an optional slash, but will not add the name= query string to the target URL.

You may also want to add the [L] flag (last) after the first rule, because you don’t need the second rule to execute if the first rule matches. (Note that this will not stop the RewriteCond and RewriteRule tests being run on the resulting redirect URL, which will have to go through the .htaccess file just like any other request.)

See the Reference Documentation for mod_rewrite in Apache 2.4 (or see the docs for the version of Apache you’re actually using).