htaccess help needed

[NathanaelCulver]

I've got a site that allows passing of a ?page= session variable to specify which page to load. I'm trying to throw together some Rewrite rules in my .htaccess, but I'm not very good at regex, I'm afraid.

Essentially, each page of my site has a name -- e.g., ABCD -- such that I can throw a URL like www.mysite.org/?page=ABCD and it will load that page. What I'm trying to do is put together a mod Rewrite rule that will scan a url for a page name in it anywhere and rewrite it to ?page=. Thus, for example, you could enter the site with any of the following:

www.mysite.org/ABCD
www.mysite.org/ABCD/
www.mysitessssss.org/ABCD.php
ABCD.mysite.org

and they would all be rewritten to mysite.org/?page=ABCD

Here's all I've got so far:

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^/([A-Za-z]+)$ /index.php?page=canon/$1/$1.php

Which works for www.mysite.org./ABCD only.

Can anyone help?

--Nathanael

[bradgrafelman]

For the first three examples, something like this might work:

RewriteRule ^/([A-Za-z]+)(/|\.[a-z0-9]+)?$ /index.php?page=canon/$1/$1.php

(untested)

As for the last example, it might be a bit trickier to do that. You could easily use a RewriteCond statement to redirect non-existent subdomains, but you'd have to list all of the valid subdomains, e.g.:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=mysite.org [nc]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=www.mysite.org [nc]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=valid-subdomain-here.mysite.org [nc]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.+)\.mysite\.org$
RewriteRule .* http://www.mysite.org/index.php?page=canon/%1/%1.php

(again, untested)

[NathanaelCulver]

Hey, thanks for the help.

I've been playing around with your suggestions. Here's what I've found so far:

Your second bit, with the RewriteConds, almost works perfectly. The only problem is it rewrites everything to lowercase. So, for example, if I try to go to ABCD.mysite.org, it gets rewritten as www.mysite.org/index.php?page=abcd, which broke my code. So I patched my code to case-desensitize it, and now that works fine.

The first part doesn't work for me, but I haven't yet done anything more than plug it in. When I get time, I'll have to study up on regex and see what I can do with it.

Thanks for the help.

[bradgrafelman]

I'm home for a bit, so I might have time later to play around with the regexp I wrote above and see if I'm missing a minor tweak to get it working.

As for the second part converting the subdomain to lower case... that's rather unexpected (for me, anyway). I thought that the [nc] flag only applied to the RewriteCond that preceded it, but perhaps it somehow changed the behavior of the entire chain of Cond's?

I might test that out too later... which version of Apache are you using?

[NathanaelCulver]

bradgrafelman;10953301 wrote:

As for the second part converting the subdomain to lower case...

Wasn't a problem -- tossed in a strtolower or two and lower-cased all my keywords. And the site's more robust now -- no longer have to worry about case.

which version of Apache are you using?

Had to contact tech support, my webhost control panel doesn't seem to include that info. In any case, they say I'm running apache 1.3.33.

--Nathanael