.htaccess - Escaping ? (Question Mark)

[donatello]

I am trying to rewrite my URLs so that they do not contain question marks...

EG - I would like to turn this:

http://www.MY-URL.com/products.php?product-x

Into this:

http://www.MY-URL.com/products/product-x

This will not work:

RewriteRule ^/products/ /products.php?

I think the solution might have something to do with using %{QUERY_STRING} as a question mark is not considered part of an URL.

[opifex]

IF products.php?product-77a
is the repeating format of the URI.... using the word "product" for each item...

RewriteRule ^products/product\-([^/]) /products.php?product\-$1 [NC,L]

should result in /products/product-77a


IF it is something like products.php?shoes-66x, products.php?shirts-21b

RewriteRule ^products/([^/]+)\-([^/]) /products.php?$1\-$2 [NC,L]

should result in /products/shoes-66x and /products/shirts-21b

.... but only if I've already had enough coffee this morning!

[donatello]

Thanks for the reply Opifex.

Tried both of your suggestions and I'm getting the same result as with other attempts...

For some reason, the "?" is not showing up, so I'm getting the file I want, but without the query results. If I manually add the "?" to the URL, the page loads fine.

If anyone wants to see the barebones functionality (I'm experimenting with it as I write this...) you can see the query by itself here:

http://www.tank-tops.net/products.php?

Any word you type after the question mark will return products which correspond...
For example:
http://www.tank-tops.net/products.php?dogs

I've got it working with .htaccess like this:
http://www.tank-tops.net/?dogs-sweatshirts (etc.)

BUT... cannot get rid of that pesky question mark!

[opifex]

Shouldn't have to escape the "?".... but, try

RewriteRule ^products/([^/]+)\-([^/]) /products.php\?$1\-$2 [NC,L]

and see if it makes any difference. Curious.

[opifex]

Was playing with the addresses....
give this a try also

RewriteRule ^products/([^/]+)\-([^/]) /products.php?product=$1\-$2 [NC,L]

because http://www.tank-tops.net/products?product=dogs-tshirt works

[donatello]

Nothing posted thus far has worked, but after two cups of coffee and a bit of Saturday morning sunshine... as well as bouncing ideas off of my good Estonian friend... I got this to work. (Actually found it on a thread elsewhere.)

This is the entire contents of the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> 
    RewriteEngine On 
    RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [QSA,L] 
</IfModule>

Found the answer here:
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/v...shared-hosting


Now it works like a charm.
Thanks Opifex for the efforts and help - you usually always nail it sooner or later, I just beat you to it this one time...

(Pure luck on my part!)


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since I have found 100 other threads on this subject with no good answer, I'll try to put more information in here for posterity...

I found an alternate way of doing it via PHP here:
http://www.hotscripts.com/category/p...ion/url-based/
Was about to try this one when I got lucky with the .htaccess file I posted above:
http://www.spiral-designs.com/produc...ipts/spiralurl
(This works like tinyURL's service http://www.tinyurl.com )

[donatello]

One more thing... don't know if it made any difference as I was trying everything, but I also created a php.ini file with the following contents:

php.ini

register_globals = on

[opifex]

FANTASTIC!!!
I'd thought about QSA, but don't have any real experience using it (I get to see it in action now!). How did the final RewriteRule come out?

The register_globals flag shouldn't affect this (I think).

[donatello]

This did it:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> 
    RewriteEngine On 
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [QSA,L] 
</IfModule>

That is the entire contents of the .htaccess file and it works.
Don't ask me to explain any of it!

BTW- What does QSA mean?

[opifex]

QSA = Query String Append
Whatever you put after the url is translated to a query string server side (?dogs-sweatshirts).
Thats why the new links that work are tank-tops.net/dogs-sweatshirts no need for the products folder emulation which I think is really a lot nicer for your site. You could add a search box that would just append whatever was entered to the base url.... hmm... "linux" returned a nice selection
... played a little and the query append MUST have 4 characters minimum and cannot accept an asterisk(*) or it returns a fail to open string warning... and a or slash(/) will call a folder of course. That can be sorted easily enough.

I have never played with QSA, but it is nice! I can think of a couple of places that this could come in handy. (One more proven tool in the arsenal!)

Oh, you can take out the "IfModule" tags if you want... that's only needed to avoid errors IF the module ISN'T installed.

[donatello]

Thanks a lot for the clarification! Awesome tool.
I have a lot to learn, but love this stuff!

You sound like a professor of computer science..

[opifex]

SHHHHH.....
That's one of my day jobs.... but looks like I'll have time to do more of my other work next semester due to budget cuts. Maybe I'll translate my syllabus and course materials to English.