Search engine friendly urls

[son]

Making urls search-engine-friendly I put the following entry in .htacess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/services/$1 /services.php?id=$1

I thought it would show me 'services.php?id=3' if I entered 'services/3' for example. Instead it says 'Page cannot be found'. The host confirmed there are no restriction with regard to rewrite engines, so I really do not understand what is going wrong. The entry is simillar to the ones I found as examples online. I would appreciate any help with this...

Son

[wige]

Try:

RewriteRule ^/services/(.*)$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

In the first portion of the rule, the question mark has a different meaning than it does in the second portion. In the first portion, it is used to denote the end of the URI. In the second portion, it denotes a variable. The text you want to store in a variable should be enclosed in parenthesis. In this case, I used .*, which is a regular expression. The dot matches any single character, while the asterisk matches any number of characters. If the only valid character is a single digit number, the following rule should work instead:

RewriteRule ^/services/[1-9]$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

If the rule should work on any number, from one to four digits, you could use this:

RewriteRule ^/services/[0-9]{1,4}$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

[a53mp]

Originally Posted by wige

Try:

RewriteRule ^/services/(.*)$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

In the first portion of the rule, the question mark has a different meaning than it does in the second portion. In the first portion, it is used to denote the end of the URI. In the second portion, it denotes a variable. The text you want to store in a variable should be enclosed in parenthesis. In this case, I used .*, which is a regular expression. The dot matches any single character, while the asterisk matches any number of characters. If the only valid character is a single digit number, the following rule should work instead:

RewriteRule ^/services/[1-9]$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

If the rule should work on any number, from one to four digits, you could use this:

RewriteRule ^/services/[0-9]{1,4}$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

if you want to allow numbers and letters use

RewriteRule ^/services/[a-zA-Z0-9]$ /service
if you want to add other characters like a dash...

RewriteRule ^/services/[a-zA-Z0-9.-]$ /service

[son]

I tried it and it still does not do it. My entry is now:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/services/[a-zA-Z0-9.-]$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

The id is actually a word or a combination of two words combined with a minus sign (if that is where my problem lies)... I do not get why this is going nowhere. Always page not found...

Any ideas?

Son

[a53mp]

the ".-" tells it to allow the minus sign

Who is your host? It might not allow mod_rewrite

[wige]

Try:

RewriteRule ^/services/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]*)$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

The dash is a reserved character and usually needs to be escaped with a backslash.

You also still need to have the parentheses. That is how mod_rewrite knows which part of the original string to use to replace the $1.

Also, you need to tell mod_rewrite how many characters to match. The brackets will only match a single character that matches the range of possible characters listed. Adding the asterisk after the closing bracket tells it to match as many characters as there are.

[son]

Checked already with Host, but they say there is no restriction on mod_rewrite and they cannot provide assistance with programming etc.

I really do not get this, the real URL could be:
http://www.domain.com/services.php?id=consultancy
so the given entry as:
RewriteRule ^/services/[a-zA-Z0-9.-]$ /services.php?id=$1 [L]

should really take care of it. It does not. I also tried on different server (with different host) and on local machine. Not any better... Why could that be?

Son