Why is .htaccess file not rewriting "-" in url

Question

So, I have a site http://example.com and i have a db with articles and what not, When the article id is http://example.com/article , everything is fine, the rewrite is done correctly, but when the ID is is http://example.com/article-name I get a 404.

This is the code:
.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ index.php?ID=$1
RewriteRule ^c/([^/]+)?$ index.php?CAT=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^topic/([^/]+)?$ index.php?topic=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

article.php

<?php
if (isset($_GET['ID'])) {
require_once 'con.php';
$ID = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_GET['ID']);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `blog_article` WHERE articleID = '$ID' ";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);
$row = mysqli_fetch_array($result);
if (mysqli_num_rows($result) == 0) {
    header("Location: /");
}
else{
    include 'article.php';
}
} 
elseif (isset($_GET['CAT'])) {
      include 'c.php'; 
} 

elseif (isset($_GET['topic'])) { 
    include 't.php'; 
  } 
else {
include 'index_view.php';
}
 ?>

Does this answer your question? [Including a hyphen in a regex character bracket?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3697202/including-a-hyphen-in-a-regex-character-bracket) — AD7six, Jul 09 '22 at 17:37

Luke Briggs · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-09T17:39:38.803

This rewrite rule:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ index.php?ID=$1

Means "if you see 1 or more letter or number in a sequence, rewrite it to index.php?ID=the_sequence_that_was_found"

The rule doesn't include any punctuation characters such as the -. If you'd like it to consider capturing letters, numbers and dashes, then the line should instead be like this:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)$ index.php?ID=$1

Note that if you want to add more characters in here, you may need to escape them. This is because characters like the dash are a special character for these regex patterns, so a backslash tells Apache that it should be a literal dash like so:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)$ index.php?ID=$1

Why is .htaccess file not rewriting "-" in url

1 Answers1