Question

I’m using mod_rewrite to transform:

www.example.com/view.php?ID=1234

into

www.example.com/1234

using the following rule:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)?$ view.php?ID=$1 [L]

which works, correctly rewriting the URL. However, when I go to the website itself at:

www.example.com

it tries to rewrite that URL as well, displaying the view.php page as if ID had been left blank, rather than displaying index.php like it normally would.

How would I go about fixing this?

Answer 1

Remove the questionmark from your RewriteRule. This makes the preceeding expression optional.

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)$ view.php?ID=$1 [L]