htaccess rewriterule for directory structure - php

Question

I have the following .htaccess rewrite problem. We have requests entering with multiple subdirectories and an .html file
for example dir1/file.html
or dir1/dir2/file.html
or dir1/dir2/dir3/file.html
or dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/file.html
what we eventually need is a rewrite rule to
index.html?dir1=$1&dir2=$2&dir3=$3&dir4=$4&file=$5
(where dir2 to dir5 would be empty if path is too short)
Is there any way to do that directly in the .htaccess file, or is it necessary to handle it in php?

Answer 1

I will see if I can test this out, but this should work for the problem as your question states it:
RewriteRule ^/([a-z0-9]+)/?([^/]*)$ /index.php?dir1=$1&$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/?$ /index.php?dir1=$1&dir2=$2&dir3=$3&dir4=$4 [L]
RewriteRule ^/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/?$ /index.php?dir1=$1&dir2=$2&dir3=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^/([a-z0-9]+)/([a-z0-9]+)/?$ /index.php?dir1=$1&dir2=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/([a-z0-9]+)/?$ /index.php?dir1=$1 [L]
I emphasize should because only you can really say what your site structure is & how this cascading ruleset would affect your application.
The regex used is fairly simple:
([a-z0-9]+)
That captures any directory name with letters & characters. If you want to capture—let’s say—underscores and dashes on top of that, it would change to something like:
([a-z0-9_-]+)
The first rewrite rule I have set—^/([a-z0-9]+)/?([^/]*)$—is to capture anything that comes after dir1 just in case there’s data to capture that is not a strict directory structure. You can comment that out if you wish. Just added it since that’s how I like to handle situations that need URL parsing like this.
Also, have you considered adding this to the rewrite rule? Perhaps at the top before the rules cascade in?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

Answer 2

I would suggest you this
http://domain/dir1-dir2-dir3-dir4-dir5-file.html
rules
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.+)-(.+) $1/$2 [N]
you can even make it dynamic by adding these
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1
this is much cleaner.
UPDATE:
well I didn't mean you use the second part but anyways I explain what I meant, it's not wrong that people use QUERY STRING for passing path in URL but it's important how you do that like in this URL
http://domain/index.php?route=dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/file.html
as you can see you will grab the path easily with just one GET variable and even handling of this in RewriteRule is much easier like
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?route=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
which will let you to have a URL like this
http://domain/dir1/dir2/dir3/.../file.html
and with any reason you may change those slash to hyphen or other acceptable chars which become like this
http://domain/dir1-dir2-dir3-dir4-dir5-dir6-dir7-file.html
and as I said it's more easier to pass the current QUERY_STRING which will look like this
http://domain/dir1-dir2-file.html?q=extra_query_value
and result in PHP if you dump $_GET will be:
q => 'extra_query_value'
route => 'dir1/dir2/file.html'
and finally in PHP you may easily explode them to have all folders' name by individual variable.