Question

I’m having this issue which I can’t figure out, I’d like to use mod_rewrite to do the following:

http://localhost/The+Beatles

into

http://localhost/artist.php?a=The+Beatles

I’ve tried following some examples on here and other sites and tayloring it to my needs I’m come up with the following but it’s not working:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) artist.php?a=$1

It seems to set the a variable to artist.php which I can’t seem to figure out? Hope someone can help.

Dave

Answer 1

You could try this set of rules (adapted from a vanilla Zend Framework project)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ artist.php?a=$1 [L,QSA]

This will rewrite requests for non-existent files to your artists.php script whilst leaving normal requests for images, stylesheets, JavaScript, etc alone.

In your artist.php script, you simply access the original request via the $_GET['a'] variable.