Question

I’m really new at this mod_rewrite stuff and I’m trying to clean up the url from a new application.

I have 2 types of URL in the site. They are always one of the formats below:

http://www.site.com/dreams.php?page=view&p=23
http://www.site.com/dreams.php?page=view&p=20
http://www.site.com/dreams.php?page=contact
http://www.site.com/dreams.php?page=contests

Now in my main page (dreams.php) I always check to see if $page is set to display the content.
How do I client my url to have:

http://www.site.com/view/23
http://www.site.com/view/20
http://www.site.com/contact
http://www.site.com/contests

There is one exception to these pages which is when the user searches for content on the vendor page.

http://www.site.com/dreams.php?page=vendor_profile&pg=2&cat=&q=c&v_search=

I started playing with this but I’m getting some very strange results.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /(.*)/(.*)/$ /dreams.php?page=$1&p=$2

Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

The expression .* is very broad and can consist of a forward slash as well, so to avoid unexpected situations, I would narrow it down, in your case:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)(?:/([\d]+)/?)?$ /dreams.php?page=$1&p=$2

That would only rewrite:

1. an address containing only lower case characters (a – z)
2. an address starting with only lower case characters, optionally followed by a forward slash and a number and optionally a forward slash at the end.

Note that in your expression, you need to have at least 3 forward slashes to match.