Simple Mod_Rewrite Examples

alexgeek

A lot of people get confused with rewrites and don't have a clue how to write their own, hopefully this thread will help you you writing your own rewrites.
The Mod_Rewrite module of apache allows you to rewrite an boring URL to one which may benefit you or your users.

For rewrites to be enabled you must put the following at the top of your ".htaccess" file:

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Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

Below the above you can put your rewrites.
The following is basic rewrite that allows you to access www.example.com/feed.xml via the URL www.example.com/feed

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RewriteRule ^feed$ feed.xml [L]

The following is a more complex example. You may be familiar with the sytem where you pass an ID to a script by using a querystring, such as www.example.com/blog.php?id=1. We can rewrite this to look more attractive (and better for SEO) by using rewrites. Rewrites use regex to pass part of the URL accessed to the script and it's querystring.
The following allows us to access /blog.php?id=N via /blog/N-text-text-text

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RewriteRule ^blog/([0-9]+)-[a-zA-Z-]+$ blog.php?id=$1 [L]

Breakdown
^ - basically means "starts with".
blog/ - a literal.
([0-9]+): The numbers in square brackets with a plus means "any number" and the parentheses ( ) tell mod_rewrite that we want the match to be passed to the script as $1.
[a-zA-Z-]+ - This means match anything that is text from A to Z in upper or lower case, or a hyphen (-), repeated.

HTH

AlexGeek
TeamLeader

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