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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T06:43:59+00:00

Not necessarily a problem, just something that I am not yet knowledgeable enough to

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Not necessarily a problem, just something that I am not yet knowledgeable enough to do. I have an .htaccess file that I am using for url rewriting. This is what I have now.

ErrorDocument 404 /inc/error_documents/404.php
ErrorDocument 503 /inc/error_documents/503.php

# For security reasons, Option followsymlinks cannot be overridden.
#Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine ON

RewriteRule ^home$ /index.php [nc]
RewriteRule ^(about|contact|giving-tree)/?$ /$1.php [nc]

RewriteRule ^giving-tree/([0-9+]?)/?$ giving-tree.php?ageBegin=$1 [nc]
RewriteRule ^giving-tree/([0-9+]?)/([0-9+]?)/?$ giving-tree.php?ageBegin=$1&ageEnd=$2 [nc]
RewriteRule ^giving-tree/([0-9+]?)/([0-9+]?)/([0-9+]?)/?$ giving-tree.php?ageBegin=$1&ageEnd=$2&page=$3 [nc]

What I want to be able to do is make some of the parts in the 3 bottom rules optional. I know that I can accomplish this with RewriteCond, but I’m not sure how. What I need is basically this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hearttohandparadise.org/giving-tree
RewriteRule /beginAge-([0-9+]) #make it send GET request with beginAge as the variable
RewriteRule /endAge-([0-9+]) \?beginAge=$1 #make it send GET request with endAge as the variable

etc… etc…

Is there any way to accomplish this just by relying on .htaccess? or am I just fantasizing?

Forgive me is I sound stupid.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    No, it’s a perfectly valid idea. You’d basically want to allow the user to write the URI in an unstructured manner, without a strict order imposed, right? Like, I could write giving-tree/page-6/endAge-23?

    If so, this is what you’re looking for:

    RewriteRule /beginAge-([0-9]+) giving-tree.php?beginAge=$1 [QSA,NC]
RewriteRule /endAge-([0-9]+) giving-tree.php?endAge=$1 [NC,QSA]
RewriteRule /page-([0-9]+) giving-tree.php?page=$1 [NC,QSA]

    You see, if any part of the URI matches the expression “/beginAge-([0-9]+)”, it’ll be redirected to giving-tree.php?beginAge=$1; the magic is done by the QSA, Query String Append, option, which, well, appends any existing query string to the resulting URI. So as more and more matches are found and more and more GET parameters added, the query string just grows.

    If you want a stricter thing, where some parameters are optional, but their order is fixed, then it’s uglier by magnitudes:

    RewriteRule /(beginAge-)?([0-9]+)/?(endAge-)?([0-9]+)?/?(page-)?([0-9]+)? giving-tree.php?beginAge=$2&endAge=$4&page=$6 [NC]

    I just made everything optional by using the ? operator. This one may use some prettifying/restructuring.

    (Alternatively, you could just do this:

     RewriteRule ^giving-tree/([^/]+)/?$ process.php?params=$1 [nc]

    That is, grabbing the entire part of the URI after the giving-tree part, lumping the whole thing into a single parameter, then processing the thing with PHP (as it’s somewhat better equipped to string manipulation). But the first version is certainly more elegant.)

    By the way, are you sure about the ([0-9+]?) parts? This means “One or no single character, which may be a digit or the plus sign”. I think you meant ([0-9]+), i.e. “one or more digit”.

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