.htaccess Optional characters?

Question

Though .htaccess, I want to redirect /page/var1/var2 to ./page.php?var1=var1&var2=var2. This is very easy BUT I want to make it so /page/var1 also redirects to ./page.php?var1=var1 (without having the var2). The only way I'm doing this is:

RewriteRule page/(.*)$ ./page.php?var1=$1
RewriteRule page/(.*)/(.*)$ ./page.php?var1=$1&var2=$2

As you can see it's very redundant, and I have a ton of lines like this, so it gets very messy. Any way to define "optional" parts?

Answer 1

mod_rewrite is not well suited to such heavy lifting, leave that to your PHP app.

 RewriteRule page/(.*)$ ./page.php?vars=$1

and somewhere near the beginning of page.php:

 <?php
 $vars = explode('/',$_GET['vars']);

Voila, you have an array of your vars; now you could do some processing there to see what is required/optional for your app and react accordingly.

Answer 2

The best approach is to just hand everything over to your PHP script.

I wrote an article on how to do friendly URLs, which covers this in more detail.

Answer 3

The expression .* matches both var1 and var1/var2 thus the first rule is applied on both.

So you have to specify it that the first rule only matches var1. This can be done by replacing . (any character) by [^/] (any character except /). So try this:

RewriteRule ^page/([^/]+)$ ./page.php?var1=$1
RewriteRule ^page/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$ ./page.php?var1=$1&var2=$2

Edit   You can also write this in one rule:

RewriteRule ^page/([^/]+)(/([^/]+))?$ ./page.php?var1=$1&var2=$3