Need some help with mod_rewrite 1

[gmail2]

I've got a php file called author.php which will pull a record from a db dependent on a given id in the URL. HOwever, I want to be able to access them like this instead:
/authors/1

Here's what I've got in my .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /beta
RewriteRule ^authors/*$ author.php?$1 [T=application/x-httpd-php]

I'm not very well up on regex so I'm not too sure what I'm doing wrong. What I thought I was saying was that anything that had a url authors/idhere would be passed as author.php?iidhere but it doesn't seem to work. Can somebody help me oout a bit?

 

[feherke]

Hi

The asterisk ( * ) character is a multiplier of the previous character. So your expression will match a string which starts with the characters "authors" and ends with zero or more "/" characters. Probably you want to match any count of any characters, which is written as [tt].*[/tt] .

Beside this, if you want to reinsert a character group, as [tt]$1[/tt], you must capture them first with parenthesis ( ( ) ), like this : [tt](.*)[/tt] .

Theoretically ( not tried, could be other errors ) :

RewriteRule ^authors/[red](.[/red]*[red])[/red]$ author.php?$1 [T=application/x-httpd-php]

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[gmail2]

feherke - thanks so much, I was reading up on reg ex but like I said, I know very little about it. Thanks for explaining it so well