.htaccess and PHP beautify URL - php

Question

I am trying out an alternative approach to beautiful URLs with PHP:
$request = explode("/", substr(#$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'], 1));
The above snippet will let me use URLs that are something like "www.example.com/index.php/article/how-to-diy" where "/article/how-to-diy" is the URL parameter.
I'd really like to lose the "index.php", though, and I am in no way a .htaccess-wiz, so I could use some help on making a rewriterule that will change my URLs into "www.example.com/article/how-to-diy".
I've looked around on SO and the examples I found were all related to a classic parameter syntax (i.e. "index.php?page=12"), which is not the solution I am after.

Answer 1

I'm accustomed to the typical MVC/Wordpress way of handling urls...less work in htaccess and all the work in the url router. I'll give an example:
.htaccess
DirectoryIndex index.php
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php
</IfModule>
Then, within index.php call a routing mechanism that parses your urls and produces the appropriate page. But don't use PATH_INFO, you need to know what is being requested:
$request = explode("/", #$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
EDIT:
If the script (index.php) and .htaccess are not located in the document root, the RewriteRule should reflect this:
RewriteRule . /path/to/index.php
And then the routing mechanism should simply loop through $request, in order to find the parts it needs.