.htacces RewriteRule not working

Hi people@stackoverflow,

Maybe I have a fundamental misconception about the working of RewriteRule. Or maybe not. Nevertheless, I'm trying to figure this out now for two days, without any progress.

This is the currrent situation:

I have a Joomla website with SEF and mod_rewrite turned on.

This results in the URL: mysite.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=7

being rewritten to:

mysite.com/sub-directory/sub-directory/0000-Business-files/

These are the lines that are currently used in my .htaccess (all standard Joomla)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^([^\-]*)\-(.*)$ $1 $2 [N]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|\%3D) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_开发者_Python百科STRING} base64_encode.*\(.*\) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

# RewriteBase /


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) index.php

RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

This is what I want to achieve:

When a visitor uses this URL mysite.com/sub directory/sub directory/0000 Business files/

it should lead him to the right page.

Although I know it's not the best idea to use spaces in a URL, I'm confronted with the fact that these 'spacious' URL's are used in a PDF, that's already been issued.

I thought I could use mod_rewrite to rewrite these URL's. But all I get is 'page not found'

I've added this rule on top of the .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^([^\-]*)\-(.*)$ $1 $2 [N]

But this is not working. What am I doing wrong? Or, also possible, am I missing the point on when and how to use mod_rewrite?

rgds, Eric

---

First off, the default behavior of apache is usually to allow direct URLs that map to the underlying file system (relative to the document root), and you should use RewriteRule when you want to work around that. Looking at your question, it seems like you want to browse the filesystem and so you should not use a RewriteRule.

If mysite.com/sub+diretory/sub+directory/0000+Business+files/ doesn't work (without your rule), I'm wondering: do you have that directory structure on your server? I.e. does it look like this?

[document root]/index.php
[document root]/sub directory/sub directory/0000 Business files/

If not, I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to achieve, and what you mean by the visitor being "lead to the right page". Could you provide an example URL that the user provides, and the corresponding URL (or file system path) that you want the user to be served.

Regarding your rewrite rule, I'm not even sure that it is allowed, and I'm surprised you don't get a 500 Internal Server Error. RewriteRule takes two arguments (matching pattern and substitution) and optionally some flags, but because of the space between $1 and $2 you're supplying three arguments (+ flags).

EDIT: I got the pattern wrong, but it still doesn't make much sense. It matches against any URL that has at least one dash in it, and then picks out the parts before and after the first dash. So, for a URL like "this-is-a-url-path/to-a-file/on-the-server", $1 would be "this" and $2 would be "is-a-url-path/to-a-file/on-the-server". Again, if I had some example URLs and their corresponding rewrites, I could help you find the right pattern.

On a side note, spaces aren't allowed in URLs, but the browser and server probably does some work behind the scenes, allowing your PDFs to be picked up correctly.