In RewriteRule if pattern and substitution begin with the same string, the RewriteRule doesn't work. Why?

Question

In this post: My previous post i was asking help for a strange issue: a correct regexp was not working in a RewriteRule. After hours of work i found how to fix the error and i found out this strange thing.

If i write this rule in .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^rankings\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.html$ /rankings.php

and type this URL

http://www.mywebsite.net/rankings/classifica.html

I get a 404 Error. Even if the Regexp is correct, the apache RewriteEngine is not working. Instead, if i write this rule:

RewriteRule ^ran-kings\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.html$ /rankings.php

and type this URL

http://www.mywebsite.net/ran-kings/classifica.html

Everything works fine. I made many other tests with different rules and pages and i always got the same problem. The conclusion i came to is that if the pattern and substitution begin with the same word, the RewriteRule doesn't work.

How come is this possible? Anybody knows why this happens?

Answer 1

Actually real problem is the MultiViews option. Multiviews allow substitutions of file extensions, so you can call an URL like http://www.example.com/page.php using http://www.example.com/page.

Use this line on top of your .htaccess to disable it:

Options -MultiViews