Question

Right now I’m using this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/?$ profile.php?userName=$1 [L]

This works for normal cases without spaces or underscores, etc… just the basics.

I need it to be pretty open to characters though – such as John_doe john-doe john doe.

I’ve tried a lot of other Regex’s, but I can’t seem to get one that works for everything. Much appreciate any help!

Thanks.

Answer 1

The . character will match any single character:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)/?$ profile.php?userName=$1 [L]

Note the use of this regex is discouraged because of character encoding purposes (and SEO as well, but I don’t know if it’s relevant to you). It’s always better to have addresses containing only lower case alphanumeric characters and dashes (-).

For more info about mod_rewrite regex, see this link.