Re: Mod RewriteRule Help : Accepting Variable Number Of Arguments

[Dragon <dragon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kristopher Yates did speak thusly:
> Hello,
>
> Here is an example URL I'm trying to create a RewriteRule for:
>
> index.php?section=help&page=test&mode=IN&item=4&action=edit
>
> I have a rule that works when the request URL contains the 
> appropriate number of arguments but does not work when there are 
> fewer arguments than the Rule expects.  I thought by creating 
> multiple (similar) rules would resolve but no luck.  Here is what I 
> have that works as long as I pass all required arguments:
>
> RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ 
> /index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3&item=$4&action=$5
>
> The above rule correctly passes 
> http://domain.com/help/test/IN/4/edit to my script as 
> /index.php?section=help&page=test&mode=IN&item=4&action=edit .
>
> I tried creating 5 rules so that, if Apache saw fewer arguments, it 
> would go down to the next rule but that didnt work like I thought it would:
>
> RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ 
> /index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3&item=$4&action=$5
> RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ 
> /index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3&item=$4
> RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ /index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3
> RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)$ /index.php?section=$1&page=$2
> RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?section=$1
>
> How do I write the rule(s) so that, if fewer arguments are passed, 
> it will still work?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
---------------- End original message. ---------------------

OK, I will take a shot at this... though I am not very experienced 
with mod_rewrite, I do know fair amount about regular expressions.

mod_rewrite documentation is here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

First off, from the documentation of mod_rewrite, the rules are 
applied in order as defined so they should fall through from one to 
the next if a higher one does not apply. So it seems like your scheme 
should work, why it doesn't is unknown to me. I am not sure about 
this but you might want to try reversing the order of your tests, do 
the smallest number of arguments first.

I think you probably ought to also use the last flag on each rule too 
so it does not skip to the next if it matches. (Now that I think 
about it, this may well be the problem here).

One thing you probably ought to account for is that you are making a 
big assumption in your RE here. That assumption is that there will 
never be a trailing slash on any of the URLs, this may not be a valid 
assumption. To fix that you need to make a change to each RE prior to 
the end of line anchor to indicate either 0 or 1 slashes may exist. 
For example:

        RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ /index.php?section=$1

This rule would match both of these:
        http://domain.com/help
        http://domain.com/help/

So here is how I suggest you try the rules:

RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ /index.php?section=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/?$ /index.php?section=$1&page=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/?$ /index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/?$ 
/index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3&item=$4 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/?$ 
/index.php?section=$1&page=$2&mode=$3&item=$4&action=$5 [L]


Let me know if this helps. I am curious to see if I was on the right track.


Dragon

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