I need assistance to rewrite dynamically-generated URLs

[mexabet]

I need assistance to rewrite the URLs dynamically generated by a PHP photo gallery script.
These examples are how the URLs currently show on web browsers:

index.php?page=list-image&album=1 (The URL of "album 1" while I name the album "Tropical Islands") and index.php?page=list-image&album=2 (The URL of "album 2 while the name might be something like " Exotic Beaches" or "Beaches").

How can I rewrite the above-mentioned "album 1" URL to be: "Tropical_Islands/" and other dynamically-generated albums to appear in that form.

This is how the image URLs show:
index.php?page=image-detail&album=1&image=1 (The URL of "image 1" of "album 1" while I name this image "Buddha Temple")

I want the image URLs to be in this form: "Tropical_Islands/Buddha_Temple/"

Can anyone please show me how to rewrite the album and image URLs in order to have search engine-friendly URLs. I have tried without success to achieve this. This is what I have done that didn't work:

## mod_rewrite configuration
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]

RewriteRule ^[a-zA-Z]$ index.php?page=list-image&album=$0
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z])\/$ /$1 [R]

RewriteRule ^([A-Z]+)([a-z)]+)([0-9)]+)\.html$ index.php?page=image-detail&album=1&image=$3

RewriteRule  ^([^/]+)/$ index.php?page=image-detail&album=1&image=$1

#Options -Indexes IncludesNOEXEC FollowSymLinks

Any help will be so much appreciated.

[orca8767]

It is generally better to provide one common Rule and allow a PHP script to parse it with functions like preg_match and such.

Example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ parse.php?url=$1

Oh, and I believe the variables for mod rewrite start at $1, not $0.
That, and your second rewrite rule lacks parentheses.

[mexabet]

orca8767,

Thanks for your reply and example. I'm new to Apache Mod_Rewrite and I seem not to grasp it clearly. Can you please use my examples/URLs to direct me further?

[orca8767]

Try using this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_])(.html)?$ index.php?page=list-image&album=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_])\/([a-zA-Z0-9_])(.html)?$ index.php?page=image-detail&album=$1&image=$2

This takes /blah.html and /blah all to /index.php?page=list-image&album=blah
And it takes /blah/blah2 and /blah/blah2.html all to /index.php?page=image-detail&album=blah&image=blah2

I added the support for .html in case you decide to use those... Note that it will NOT work if you don't use the .html and you have a trailing slash in a url like http://mysite.com/album/ because if i added this it would wreck indexing of directories and such. Instead of /album/ it should be /album WITHOUT the trailing slash. same with /album/image_name. Or, if you use /album.html and /album/image_name.html you don't even have to worry about making sure you don't include the trailing slashes.

[mexabet]

Hi orca8767,

I tried the code, but couldn't get it to work. This is how the whole file looked after adding your code:

## mod_rewrite configuration
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_])(.html)?$ index.php?page=list-image&album=$1

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_])\/([a-zA-Z0-9_])(.html)?$ index.php?page=image-detail&album=$1&image=$2

#Options -Indexes IncludesNOEXEC FollowSymLinks

[orca8767]

Can I have more details than "it did not work" please? Like what is the problem? 404 error whenever you tried a URL? 500 error?

Note that it needs to be /album_name or /album_name.html for it to be the album.
And for an image it needs to be /album_name/image_name or /album_name/image_name.html
No trailing slashes if you don't use .html at the end.

EDIT:
I made a simple error in the regular expressions. Stupid nearly-unreadable regular expressions. Grr...

Updated code:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)(.html)?$ index.php?page=list-image&album=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)\/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)(.html)?$ index.php?page=image-detail&album=$1&image=$2