Rewrite Pretty or SEO friendly URL via htaccess - php

Question

I have a problem with transforming urls from dynamic to static.
I have a site where different pages are generated with a dynamic url, like:
www.example.com/?pr=project-abc123
I would like to rewrite the url of each one with htaccess making it static, like this:
www.example.com/project-abc123
// or
www.example.com/pr/project-abc123
Now, i found this htaccess code that seems to work:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \?
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^p=(.*)$
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/%1? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index/?pr=$1[L]
URLs are rewritten as indicated (first type, whitout /pr/ ), but gives me a multiple choice error. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Let's understand RewriteRule directive which is the real rewriting workhorse.
A RewriteRule consists of three arguments separated by spaces. The arguments are
Pattern: which incoming URLs should be affected by the rule;
Substitution: where should the matching requests be sent;
[flags]: options affecting the rewritten request.
Let's start with the following snippet:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
First line of code, describes RewriteEngine is turned on. Here I use RewriteCond directive which defines a rewrite rule condition. Using RewriteCond directive we defined two conditions here. This directive took a server variable called REQUEST_FILENAME. The two conditions above tell if the request is not a file or a directory, then meet the rule set by RewriteRule. See more details on this issue.
Now it's time to write some rewrite rules. Let's convert
www.example.com/?pr=project-abc123
// to
www.example.com/project-abc123
and rewrite rule will be:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/?pr=$1 [L]
And to get the www.example.com/pr/project-abc123 we need the rule as the below:
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z]+)/(.*)$ index.php/?$1=$2 [L]
// or
RewriteRule ^/?pr/(.*)$ index.php/?pr=$1 [L]
The [L] flag tells mod_rewrite to stop processing the rule set. This means that if the rule matches, no further rules will be processed.