How to differentiate document requests from variable requests? and how to allow for urls that are not expected?

Question

Hello.

My last post was met by smarmy, unhelpful "answers" (comments), so i'll get right to it:

if I have an htaccess file like so:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)$ /index.php?page=$1&subject=$2
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ /index.php?page=$1 [L]

how can I allow for other url variable names and values to be handled... say for instance I want to add extra unexpected url vars to this scenario

/page/subject?urlvar1=value1&urlvar2=value2

and get the page I want without creating unexpected results?

Any real help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

you need to add [QSA] (query string append) flag to your rules.

As a general advice, it's better to have only one generic rule like

 RewriteRule .* index.php?path=$0

and parse the path at php level. This is much more flexible and transparent.

to elaborate, here's the complete setup

.htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .* index.php?path=$0 [QSA]

index.php

<pre>
<?php 
print_r($_GET);
?>
</pre>

when called like www.example.com/foo/bar/baz?quux=123&blah=456 this prints

Array
(
    [path] => foo/bar/baz
    [quux] => 123
    [blah] => 456
)

the only thing that's left is to parse $_GET['path'] with explode or regular expressions.