Generic htaccess URL rewriting

Question

Even simple .htaccess gives me headaches and I need to do the following generic mapping:

http://example.com/project/controllername/key1/val1/key2/val2/.../keyN/valN

-->

http://example.com/project/controllername.xyz?key1=val1&key2=val2...&keyN=valN

example:

http://example.com/so/pagecontroller/id/1/time/12345/title/helloworld

-->

http://example.com/so/pagecontroller.xyz?id=1&time=12345&title=helloworld

Any guidance will help! Especially with handling special chars like '/', '?' and '&' (more?) in keys and values.

EDIT: To clarify, 'project' and 'controllername' paths are dynamic - they are not static. Also the number of keys and values is not pre-determined! I need help in creating the htaccess file code and where to place this file in the web tree and if apache needs restarting everytime the htaccess file is modified. Thanks!

Answer 1

As long as you don't want to select those special characters, they should be no problem. A rule for your example might be:

RewriteRule http://example.com/so/pagecontroller/id/([0-9]+)/time/([0-9]+)/title/(.*)$ http://example.com/so/pagecontroller.xyz?id=$1&time=$2&title=$3  

I don't think you can have a dynamic number of variables in a rewrite rule. But what you can do is the following:

RewriteRule http://example.com/so/pagecontroler/(.*) http://example.com/so/pagecontroler.xyz?vars=$1

Than you have a GET parameter with the name "vars" and the rest of the query as a value. You can than split the different keys and values server side e.g. with the explode() function of PHP.

Answer 2

Try these rules:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+/[^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)(/.+)?$ $1$4?$2=$3 [QSA,N]
RewriteCond $1 !.+\.xyz$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/[^/]+)$ $1.xyz [L]