mod_rewrite and Dynamic Directory Structure

Question

I'm building a page admin in php and have a function that lets me make pages children of other pages. With a recursive function (based on who is a parent of who) I end up with a list of links like:

<ul class="navList" id="navList">

   <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Home"&gt;Home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
   <li><a href="http://mysite.com/About"&gt;About&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
   <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Links"&gt;Link Page</a>

   <ul>

      <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Links/PHP_Links"&gt;PHP Links</a></li>
      <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Links/JQuery_Links"&gt;JQuery Links</a></li>
      <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Links/Contributors"&gt;Contriubutors&lt;/a&gt;

      <ul>

         <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Links/Contributors/Blog"&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

      </ul>

      </li>

   </ul>

   </li>

   <li><a href="http://mysite.com/Portfolio"&gt;Portfolio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

</ul>

So, you can see it's possible to end up with multiple directories. Now, my question is, how do I anticipate and handle this with mod_rewrite? I've got a script I use for a situation where the directory might be just one level deep, but anything past one directory will just reroute to the home page as an error...

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^/.]+)$ index.php?category=$1&page=$2 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/$ index.php?category=$1 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,NC]

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?page=home
ErrorDocument 403 /index.php?page=home

I'm supposing this is sort of a logic question.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

I think you'll have to do this by hand :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^/.]+)/([^/.]+)$ index.php?category=$1&page=$2&subpage=$3 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^/.]+)$ index.php?category=$1&page=$2 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/$ index.php?category=$1 [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,NC]

Answer 2

Ok, so, writing it out here seemed to help. This is what I did...

I changed my mod_rewrite to send me the whole string

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^.*]+)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,NC]

Then in my php I explode $page with '/'

$dirStructure = explode('/',$page);

So if the url were to be Links/Blog/Thoughts I'd get an array I could sort through like:

Array
(
[0] => Links
[1] => Blog
[2] => Thoughts
)

I can then just look for my page that corresponds with the last element of the array.