Parsing SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] for includes and such

I was going to do this, but I thought I might be tangling up my logic, or overlooking something whether it be elegance or security... I was hoping someone could weigh in.

Is there any problem with doing something like this?

htaccess:
RewriteRule ^[a-zA-Z0-9/_-]+/?$ /index.php

index.php:
$uriArr = explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
include($uriArr[1].'php');

Is there something obviously bad about this?

It seems nice because then say 'domain.com/article/title' was requested,
index.php would include article.php, which then could contain code to query db for $uriArr[2]. And could use switch/case so if count($uriArr) < 2 then it could list 'articles'.And would be endlessly expandable.

One problem I can think of may be that it would be greedy?
As in if request URI was 'domain.com/article/non-existant/nonsense', if might not return a 404, if error checking wasn't robust?

What are the implications of not returning 404's when they should, and anything relevant to this method?

I don't think there are any problems with your approach. I personally use a similar approach but a more strict approach with servers that don't support mod_rewrite for example.

I am not going to hand over any code here, but here is a clue as to how I go about handling requests.

After configuring the server to forward all requests, including error requests, to a specific page such as index.php, I create a collection of regular expressions to match specific url patterns in that page, and handle every request accordingly. For example

/^articles\/([a-z]+)\/([a-z0-9\_]*\.html)$/i

The above expression would match something like: articles/java/mysql_connections01.html

Depending on the number of different urls you wish to serve, you can create an array filled with regular expressions...each of which is customized to point to a specific page that would know how to handle a given request.

However, you should handle all requests and ensure that when a resource is not available, a 404 error is thrown and caught correctly without generating pages vulnerable to XSS attacks.

thanks for the input ess.
Sometimes when I have an idea and it seems simple enough and like it will work, I like to just bounce it off someone first.
In the past I've thought of something and thought it would be a good idea, then realize later the obvious flaw in logic or blatant security flaw that i simply overlooked.

any other input from anyone would be interesting as well.
Thanks again!