Apache Web Server Forum

Once one of those friendly links is requested by a client, your server can then rewrite it to the form needed to call your script:

#rewrite the m, p, and cat fake folders
RewriteRule ^(m¦p¦cat)/([0-9]+)/?$ /index.php?$1=$2 [L]

If those are your only three 'fake folders,' then that's the only rule needed to make it work.

If your script has already been modified to extract the correct parameters from the friendly URL, then you don't need to rewrite the query string at all; Just rewrite requests for any of those three folders to the script:

#rewrite the m, p, and cat fake folders
RewriteRule ^(m¦p¦cat)/[0-9]+/?$ /index.php [L]


After getting this working, what usually happens is we get another question: "How do I remove those old query-string URLs from the search engine indices? The answer is to use an external redirect, looking only at the original (non-rewritten) URL received in the client's HTTP request:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?(m¦p¦cat)=([0-9]+)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.example.com/%1/%2/ [R=301,L]

Because this ruleset looks only at the client browser/spider's request, and not at any previously-rewritten URLs, the two rules won't interefere with each other and create a loop; They can appear in .htaccess in any order.

BTW, an example of the form of %{THE_REQUEST} received from a browser is "GET /index.php?p=1234 HTTP/1.1"
You can see these requests in most server's raw access logs, which are built from the same server variables that mod_rewrite can test.

Replace all broken pipe "¦" characters above with solid pipe characters (usually Shift-\) before use.

Jim

[edited by: jdMorgan at 6:25 pm (utc) on April 2, 2005]

Thanks

#default for a numbered directory is posting.
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)$ /$1/ [R=301]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/$ /index.php?p=$1 [L]

Jim