Cleaning up nested mod_rewrite statements

Question

I am cleaning up a large .htaccess file containing a lot of mod_rewrite statements.

The biggest part of the clutter comes from statements catching various occurrences of

/directory1
/directory1/directory2
/directory1/directory2/directory3

using statements like

RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$   
RewriteRule .* /front.php?level1=%1&level2=%2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$   
RewriteRule .* /front.php?level1=%1&level2=%2&level3=%3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

could somebody versed with mod_rewrite give me a pointer on how to write one universal statement that will catch any depth of directory1/directory2... and put the appropriate level variable into the RewriteRule?

Answer 1

Rather use the following rewriterule

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ front.php/$1 [L]

and access folders by pathinfo in front.php:

$pathinfo = $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];

You can alternatively also enable MultiViews in Apache and configure it to use front.php as index file instead and grab pathinfo the same way.