mod_rewrite rules and content negotiation

Question

I am relatively new to mod_rewrite, but have a site which I would like to have "pretty urls." Similarly to SO :).

I am attempting to have things like: "http://www.whatever.com/search/test" get rewritten to "http://www.whatever.com/search.php?q=test" and have had some limited success. I believe that content negotiation is getting in my way...

For starters here's my test .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~user/mysite/

RewriteRule ^search$ search/ [R]
RewriteRule ^search/([^/]*)/?$ search.php?q=$1 [L]

Which unfortunately, does redirect to search.php, but does not pass my param in the q variable. However this does work:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~user/mysite/

RewriteRule ^search$ search/ [R]
RewriteRule ^search/([^/]*)/?$ s.php?q=$1 [L] # here i've renamed the search.php to s.php to dodge the content negotiation that is happening..

In fact, if I remove the rules all together, I get the same result as with the first version of the file. So my conclusion is that since apache is happily redirecting "foo" to "foo.php" even without any mod_rewrite rules, that it must be the content negotiation that is taking care of it. (This is further verified by the fact if I renamed my foo.php to foo.html, it still will find the file if i just go to "foo").

So, the question is. How do I properly use mod_rewrite with regard to content negotiation? Can I disable it for a particular file? Is there a way to ensure that my mod_rewrite rules happen before the content negotiation happens?

If it is relevant, here is the conf file for the mod_userdir part of my apache conf (this test site is in my user's homedir/public_html):

# Settings for user home directories

<IfDefine USERDIR>
<IfModule userdir_module>

# UserDir: The name of the directory that is appended onto a user's home
# directory if a ~user request is received.  Note that you must also set
# the default access control for these directories, as in the example below.
UserDir public_html

# Control access to UserDir directories.  The following is an example
# for a site where these directories are restricted to read-only.
<Directory /home/*/public_html>
    AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes
    Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
    <Limit GET POST OPTIONS>
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
    </Limit>
    <LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS>
     Order deny,allow
     Deny from all
    </LimitExcept>
</Directory>

# Suexec isn't really required to run cgi-scripts, but it's a really good
# idea if you have multiple users serving websites...
<IfDefine SUEXEC>
<IfModule suexec_module>
<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>
    Options ExecCGI
    SetHandler cgi-script
</Directory>
</IfModule>
</IfDefine>

</IfModule>
</IfDefine>

Answer 1

Look for this option in your configuration.

Options +Multiviews

It will look for

/foo/test
/foo/
/foo

and redirect them to

/foo.[any file]

based upon if it exists and if it fits the content-type requested.

Change the option to this to disable this.

Options -Multiviews