Friendly URLs -> Mod Rewrite help

leatherback

Hi All,

Although I realize this is edge-to-off-topic, I hope somebody can give me a hand here.

I am tranforming my existing personal website, and am trying to create search-engine friendly URLs. With this, I have ventured in new terrain, of Mod rewrite..

So I am going from this:

http://www.domain.com/links/index.php?keys=test_my_string
to this:
http://www.domain.com/links/index/keys/test_my_string/

Now, I am using a modrewite rule like:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule index/(.)/(.)/$ /links/index.php?$1=$2

To create this effect.
How would I go about this, if I did not know beforehand how many variables would be passed to the page? I mean: I am using nested categories, which can result in 1 to 100 (Theoretically) categories to be passed.. Is there a repetition flag, or a looping?

It would be great if somebody could show me howto & explain what the individual steps do..

THanks so much!

konsu

hello, first, there is a way to invoke an external script from a mod_rewrite rule. just look up the documentation. but then, i would simply write a rule that would convert

http://www.domain.com/links/index/key0/value0/.../keyN/valueN/

http://www.domain.com/links/index.php?path=/key0/value0/.../keyN/valueN/

and split the path inside index.php

leatherback

Hi Konsu,

THanks for the reply. Definately an option, which I will revert to if this is the best solution coming up.
However.. I'd like to use the servers' mechanisms, instead of having to rely on my own coding, wherever possible. So I hope there are some more takers !?

konsu

yeah, i understand. i found a much simpler case at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/misc/rewriteguide.html (see the "Other" section at the very bottom) and this case has to be handled by an external script. yours is more difficult, so i doubt that you can just use a built-in mechanism. but if you find out, please post here, because i would like to know as well. thanks.

leatherback

Yeah, I did the basic search, but I remember a fe months ago I came across a place where they explained how to do it. So recursion is possible with mod-rewrite, but I am not clear on how to do it, and the apache manual on this topic is not the best in the world (understatement, I think)

Thx, I'll just sit, wait hope and pray! Anybody!?

konsu

is mod_rewrite invoked again after a rewrite with the resulting URL?

leatherback

Oonly if you do a redirect, which I am not planning on doing, since it make the clean-url appoach a bit absolute

konsu

well, RewriteRule's [N] flag is what i had in mind.

so, i cannot get to apache right now and try it, but it seems that having several recursive RewriteRule's should do it:

RewriteRule ^{/links/index/([^{/]+)/([^/]+)/$}} /links/index.php?$1=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^{/links/index/([^{/]+)/([^/]+)/(.+)/$}} /links/index/$3/?$1=$2 [QSA,N]

something along these lines. i am not an expert in mod_rewrite though. basically the idea is to do it a pair at a time and rerun the matching process after a pair has been processed. note that this code does not handle the query string properly.