Bloody Mod Rewrite!!

[Stress Head]

OK. Got my rewrite working sort of.

I have the following rule working fine

RewriteRule ^celeb/(.*).html$ celeb.php?Celeb=$1

This works fine if the name is Madonna. But if the name is Jennifer Lopez, then I get celeb/Jennifer%20Lopez.html in the URL.

How can I change the rule to replace the %20 with a -

[dmorison]

What apears in the URL is down to whatever is generating the URL - it happens before any re-write rules come into play.

In other words, there's nothing you can do in your .htaccess that will fix the %20; it has to be done wherever /celeb/Jenifer Lopez.html is being generated, which I guess would be in some other script on your site. If that's the case; then the other script needs to be responsible for doing a str_replace on " " with "-".

[Rich]

Spaces will always really get converted to either %20 or + by browsers or webservers as spaces in urls arn't valid.

The solution to your problem is just to link to celeb/Jennifer-Lopez.html that will then result into a local request of celeb.php?Celeb=Jennifer-Lopez.

Don't forget mod_rewite is only involved in getting from the html to the php so if you're getting celeb/Jennifer%20Lopez.html then its your php thats generating that (probably as the invalid 'celeb/Jennifer Lopez.html') and is not connected to the mod_rewrite rule.

So at the start of your php replace '-'s with spaces in your Celeb variable and before outputing any links replace spaces with '-'s .. then work out what to do with names with hyphens in them!

edit: hmm, guess I pretty much just wrote the same as dmorison

[Stress Head]

Thanks guys.

I did try the php echo str_replace(" ", "-", method and it works fine at changing the url to celeb/Jennifer-Lopez.html BUT as the record in the database is Jennifer Lopez NOT Jennifer-Lopez it returns an empty result.

I realise I could just replace all the spaces in the database records for - but I am trying to leave the data in it's original format, so that updating it doesn't have me spending hours doing find replace every time I want to update it. Long term idea being the updating is done automatically by a cron or something.

So is there a way to remove the - before running the query.

I'm a bit of a novice at php as you can no doubt tell

[Swiss]

You do a str_replace(" ","-",$string) when creating your links, and then you do another str_replace, but in reverse before querying your database.

[NetNeo]

I use this too, and Kris is correct.

To generate the page name use:
echo str_replace(" ","-",$Celeb) . ".html";

Then, in the file celeb.php use the following at the top of the page:
$Celeb = str_replace("-"," ",$_GET['Celeb']);

This would then work for you

(N.B. before I am flamed, this will work but I would recommend validating the passed variable correctly as the example above would live you open to hacking!!!!!)

I hope this clarifies it all a little better and puts all the replys into one answer. Good luck, stick at it as it works excellently if you can crack the mod_rewrite.

One of my sites has 4 physical pages yet has over 360,000 viewable pages all down to mod_rewrites

[Stress Head]

Thanks for the replies guys. As a bit of a php novice I couldn't figure out how to remove the - from the string before running the query. BUT thanks to NetNeo I have done it. Afraid I am using DW to write my php so deciphering it isn't easy.

Had to start learning to hand code first, but well worth it as it taught me quite a bit, along with how to fix this problem.

For anyone with the same problem, this is what I did for the link

<?php echo str_replace(" ", "-", $row_celebs['CELEB']); ?>.html">

Then in Jennifer-Lopez.html (for example) I added the bit in red

if (isset($_GET['Celeb'])) {
$colname_main_query = (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) ? str_replace("-"," ",$_GET['Celeb']) : addslashes($_GET['Celeb']);
}

Thanks again.

[redbird]

It isn't just the spaces you might have a problem with you might want to look at using urlencode and urldecode

This link will explain better than I can
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php