Passing a URL as a varible via mod rewrite

Question

I am trying to pass a actual url as a varible using mod_rewrite on apache

I have a page externalLink.php that can be passed a url in oder to do some magic i.e.

/externalLink.php?url=http://example.com

I wnat this to be a nice url like /external/http://example.com

I have added a rewrite rule to my htaccess that I hope might work, but as a suspected it does not.

RewriteRule ^external/([^/.]+)/*$ /externalLink.php?url=$1 [L]

Does anyone know if this is possible ?

Thanks in advance

.k

Answer 1

Try this rule:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /external/(http://[^\ ]*)
RewriteRule ^external/http:/ externalLink.php?url=%1 [L]

You need to examine THE_REQUEST as Apache strips empty path segments in the URL path.

Answer 2

there will occur problems with the slashes in http://

try:

RewriteRule ^external/(^http:\/\/.+)/$ /externalLink.php?url=$1 [L]