First, this problem is on my local testing site; the live site is okay.
I have a site where there is a link to blah.com/sitemap. In the DocRoot there is a file called sitemap.xml, which I don't want to display in response to that link. There is a rewrite rule in /.htaccess:
RewriteRule "^([a-z]{1}[\w_\-]+[a-z]{1})$" "/index.php?action=$1" [L]
So, /sitemap should be rewritten to index.php?action=sitemap. The rewrite rule works for everything else on the site.
I presume there is an apache configuration difference between the live and local sites, but I've exhausted my ideas for what it might be. Any ideas? Thanks.