Question

I’m trying to create a rule used in a .htaccess file to match anything but a particular string, in this case: index.

I thought that it should be possible to match this special string first and use [L] but that’s not working,
and it should be possible using the following regex, but it causes a 500 error.

I want to match:

• pagename1
• pagename2/whatever
• pagename3/234/whatever
• about
• contact-us
• (etc)

but not

• index/123
• index/124/whatever

(BTW “index” is the name of a file with no extension, not my choice, this is a work thing)

^(?!index)[\w/\-]+

I assume that apache’s implementation of regex doesn’t cope with the (?!xxx) rule.

Any help/suggestions will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use RewriteConds to do this, for example:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^index
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?what=$1

That will rewrite every URL which doesn’t start by index. If you want it to avoid it anywhere in the URL, remove the ^