Why does my URL while using the CodeIgniter framework only work with a question mark in front of the directory?

I'm using the following code for my .htaccess for the PHP framework CodeIgniter.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

### Canonicalize codeigniter URLs

# If your default controller is something other than
# "welcome" you should probably change this
RewriteRule ^(welcome(/index)?|index开发者_StackOverflow(\.php)?)/?$ / [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index/?$ $1 [L,R=301]

# Removes trailing slashes (prevents SEO duplicate content issues)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ $1 [L,R=301]

# Enforce www
# If you have subdomains, you can add them to 
# the list using the "|" (OR) regex operator
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www|subdomain) [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]

# Enforce NO www
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]

###

# Removes access to the system folder by users.
# Additionally this will allow you to create a System.php controller,
# previously this would not have been possible.
# 'system' can be replaced if you have renamed your system folder.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^system.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index\.php/$1 [L]

# Checks to see if the user is attempting to access a valid file,
# such as an image or css document, if this isn't true it sends the
# request to index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index\.php/$1 [L]

If I type in the url http://linuxservers.org/articles The articles page does not load (the index does). However, if I type in linuxservers.org/?articles or /?/articles the page will load. I don't get it.

In addition to that, if I change the last line in the code above to

    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index\.php/?$1 [L]

OR

    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index\.php?/$1 [L]

(which redirects /articles to either /?articles or /?/articles, the page loads. index.php/articles loads the page as well, which is the default format for CodeIgnitor.

Hopefully that made sense, if not, ask me questions. Looking forward to your input.

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Where did you get your .htaccess file from? The one on the CodeIgniter wiki has the last line as:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

Which is one of your working options.