Htaccess regex working strange

Question

I am trying to write .htacess file that would catch urls like:

http://www.site.com/pageone.html

http://www.site.com/pagetwo.html

and redirect them to index.php so it would receive 'pageone' and 'pagetwo' as GET parameters.

Below is my htacess:

Options +FollowSymlinks

AuthUserFile /dev/null

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

RewriteEngine On

RewriteOptions inherit

RewriteRule ^((?:.[^/])+).html$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

AddHandler php5-script .php

The problem with this regexp is that it catches some pages while showing 404 error on others. And i don't understand this behavior.

For example

http://www.site.com/draw.html

works fine. I get 'draw' as GET parameter in my script.

But

http://www.site.com/draws.html

redirects to 404 page

Could anyone explain what is wrong with my htacess ?

p.s. - i am seeing this on a local Apache server under typical MAMP config.

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^((?:.[^/])+).html$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

• ^ = anchor at the start of the URI
• (?: = extended expression to group without creating a backreference; unsure what the purpose is here.
• . = match a single character.
• [^/] = match anything that's not a slash
• + = all of the above, repeated one or more times
• .html = must end in .html
• $ = anchor the end of the URI.

This code would match, among other things, /ab/cd/ef/foo.html, which will never occur in a per-directory context.
It would not match odd-length resources or directories, since you explicitly ignore those with (.[^/]).

Since you don't specify if multiple subdirectories should be handled or not, just matching what you described can be done much, much easier with:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+).html$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

For further help with troubleshooting, see the RewriteLog documentation