.htaccess page rewrite with spelling errors - php

Question

I am building a content management system to allow a companies staff members to be listed via category. Essentially, this is what I'm trying to accomplish:
There is a page called inside.php that contains 404, 500, etc. errors. We have a page called physicians.php that passes variables and displays specific information based on the variable so physicians.php?id=1 would display a specific category of staff members. Currently, when you go to http://website.com/physicians or http://website.com/physicians/ it redirects to http://website.com/physicians.php just fine, but the problem is that happens even if you type some variation of the word physicians. Example being that physiciansasfhouiae would still link to physicians.php where we want it to link to inside.php because it is technically a non-existing page.
Here is the rewrite code that I have now:
RewriteEngine on
#enables you to access PHP files with HTML extension
AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .html .htm
RewriteCond ${REQUEST_URI} ^.+$
RewriteRule ^detail/(css|js|img)/(.*)?$ /$1/$2 [L,QSA,R=301] [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} physicians
RewriteRule .* physicians.php
RewriteRule ^physicians/((([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?)*)$ physicians.php?id=$1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^((([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?)*)$ inside.php?page=$1

Answer 1

You should start by deleting these 2 lines:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} physicians
RewriteRule .* physicians.php
Not only are these 2 lines not necessary due to the RewriteRule that's already below them, but they're causing the main problem you're noticing. Those 2 lines match any URL with the substring "physicians" in it, which is not quite what you want. So you need to make your matching pattern more specific; thankfully, the next RewriteRule line is already doing that:
RewriteRule ^physicians/((([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?)*)$ physicians.php?id=$1 [NC,L]
That line is really all you need to accomplish what you want. It tells Apache to only match the word "physicians" if it's the first word of the URL and ends in a slash (i.e. the whole, exact word "physicians"), which won't match misspellings like "physiciansasfhouiae".
But as a suggestion, I would tweak it slightly to make the optional trailing slash still match, and remove the slashes from the ID parameter:
RewriteRule ^physicians(/((([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?)*))?$ physicians.php?id=$4 [NC,L]
So this will send all these variations to physicians.php:
/physicians
/physicians/
/physicians/abc123
/physicians/abc123/
And the ID parameter will equal abc123 (if it's provided). All other requests will go to inside.php, even if the URL contains a variation of "physicians".