Can I provide a default value in a rewrite rule if the expression doesnt match?

Question

I'm not even sure if I'm going about this the right way, so I'm going to present the entire problem here.

I have a site with URLs that look like this:

www.example.com/some-random-key/page.php

and I'm redirecting like so:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*?)/(.*?)$ $2?key=$1

and this MOSTLY working. My problem is the following two URLs end up not being equivilent:

www.example.com/my-key
www.example.com/my-key/

The 2nd example behaves as expected, redirecting to index.php at the root level, and passing along 'my-key' as the parameter.

The first example fails with a not found error.

Is there a way to add a rule that says if the file isnt found, then fetch index.php?key=$key or am I approaching this from the wrong angle?

Answer 1

Your problem is basically the regex. You are trying to match anything followed by a slash, and followed by anything.

You should try:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ $2?key=$1 [R,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ?key=$1 [R,L]

The first block is your config, and works just like you need. The second one applies only if there is no trailing slash, which is what you want.

the only drawback is that if anyone asks for an URL which does not have its corresponding page.php after the key (let's say /some-key/nonexistant.php), it will be redirected to ?key=nonexistant.php (don't know how to call this, feature or bug :P).

The default page for the request /?key=your-key is you DefaultIndex