URL Rewriting $_GET - php

Question

I made my own MVC app. And I am using the following RewriteRule in an .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\/]*)$ index.php?p=$1
Then when i go to this url:
http://localhost/myapp/dahsboard/index
I get my variable $_GET['p']=dahsboard/index & it works.
But I use AutoComplete from jQueryUI with Ajax and it send a variable $_GET['term'] with the value of the input used by AutoComplete.
My URL is then:
http://localhost/myapp/dashboard/index?term='myvalue'
My .htaccess doesn’t resolve it and I don't know how to.

Answer 1

Easy. Change your RewriteRule from this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\/]*)$ index.php?p=$1
To this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\/]*)$ index.php?p=$1 [L,QSA]
Which uses the QSA flag which will carry over the query string to the rewritten destination.
So when you go to this URL:
http://localhost/myapp/dahsboard/index?term='myvalue'
It will be passed on like this:
http://localhost/myapp/dahsboard/index.php?p=index&term=myvalue
And if I place the following in index.php:
<?php
echo '<pre>';
print_r($_GET);
echo '</pre>';
?>
The returned output is:
Array
(
[p] => index
[term] => 'myvalue'
)
Additionally, if you want to easily debug the results you can do so by using R flag in addition to the L & QSA like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\/]*)$ index.php?p=$1 [L,R,QSA]
And then run a curl -I to check the Apache headers which should tell you where it will send the URL to via the Location: header:
curl -I http://localhost:8888/myapp/dahsboard/index?term='myvalue'
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 16:07:29 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.23 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.23 OpenSSL/0.9.8r DAV/2 PHP/5.4.10
Location: http://localhost:8888/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/myapp/dahsboard/index.php?p=index&term=myvalue
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Now yes, the R flag adds extra path info of /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ to the URL I am not 100% clear on why that happens. But for basic debugging like this, you can read the headers nicely to see that the final destination of index.php?p=index&term=myvalue is being sent. And once you know that, remove the R flag when you put these rules into production.
FWIW, the http://localhost:8888/Applications/MAMP/ reflects my local MAMP setup in Mac OS X. So ignore that. Your local setup will most likely return 100% different info. But the basic concept is solid.

Answer 2

To combine new and old query strings, use the [QSA] flag.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\/]*)$ index.php?p=$1 [QSA]