Help with mod rewrite regular expression

Need to include dot as part of the condition

[Sudar]

I have the following rewrite rule setup in my site

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)/?$ /search.php?l=$1 [L]

which will redirect urls like [mysite...] to [mysite...]

But now the problem I face is that the above rule breaks when there is a dot(.) in the url.

I tried to change the rule to

RewriteRule ^(.+)/?$ /search.php?l=$1 [L]

But is not working and gave me an internal server error.

So can any one help me with the rule so that it also includes url with a dot (.) in them.

Thanks
Sudar

[equalm]

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)/?$ /search.php?l=$1 [L]

I'm a bit confused. How does [^.]+ help you? Maybe someone else can help me understand. To me, that says anything except any character. Odd.

Anyway, can you just get away with something simple?

RewriteRule ^([A-Z0-9\.\-]+)/?$ /search.php?l=$1 [NC,L]

[Sudar]

Equalm,
I am not an expert in mod_rewrite but this is how it’s been working for me close to 2 years now.

Here dot (.) matches only the literal (.) character and is not matching ‘any character expect the new line character’.

I want all the characters after the domain name to be passed to the query string (even special characters like $,#,^ etc) so I cannot use the rule

RewriteRule ^([A-Z0-9\.\-]+)/?$ /search.php?l=$1 [NC,L]

But anyways thanks for replying.

[RazvanG]

This should work

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ search.php?l=$1 [L]

cheers

[Sudar]

Hi RazvanG,

Thanks for replying.

But when I try this I am getting internal server error with error code 500

Thanks,
Sudar

[jdMorgan]

The regex token and escaping rules change slightly within [] character groups.

So [^.]+ means, "one or more characters not equal to a dot/period/full stop."

However, if you want to "allow" dots in the requested URL-path, and you change the rule pattern to this:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ search.php?l=$1 [L]

Then a different problem arises: There is nothing to stop mod_rewrite from rewriting "search.php" to "search.php?l=search.php" -- or from doing so multiple times in an 'infinite' loop.

This problem can be corrected by adding a RewriteCond -- in this case:

RewriteCond $1 !^search\.php$
RewriteRule (.*) search.php?l=$1 [L]

Whenever you get a server error, check your server error log. Along with the server access log data, the information in the error log is often very useful.

Jim

[Sudar]

Hi Jim,

Works like a charm now.
Thanks for the rule and also for clearing up the confusion regarding [^.]+
You are a real genius! :-)

[RazvanG]

glad it finally worked due to the experience of the community ;)