Question

The problem: I cannot figure out how to match a literal dot in my expression so I could rewrite query strings containing dots. First I tried something like this:

RewriteRule ^([\.\w]+)$ index.php?url=$1 [L]

I have a php script:

echo "url is: ".$_GET['url'];

which should, in theory, output anything that I write in my query. But for any query containing only letters and dots, my script always outputs:

url is: index.php

I’ve tried these expressions as well:

^(.+)$
^([.\w]+)$

And the result is the same.

So the question is: are my expressions wrong or does this have something to do with server’s config?

Answer 1

It looks like there is another request which is processed before the rule is applied, if I use a rule which matches less than index.php (e.g. .. for matching xy), the result is as expected: xy. With more relaxing rules like .* or .+ it fails. x.* works fine however.

You can add another condition to ignore requests like index.php:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index\.php$
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?url=$1 [L]

This was tested/ debugged with:

<?php
printf("url is: %s <br>\n", htmlspecialchars(filter_input(INPUT_GET, 'url')));
echo "<pre>",htmlentities(print_R($_SERVER, 1));