cleaner url with htaccess

Question

Ok so i am using opencart which is an open source shopping cart. I installed it here the problem is that when you click on anything and I mean anything the url goes from this

http://royaltyfreesoundbank.com/

to

http://royaltyfreesoundbank.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=18

so ultimately what is happening is that

/index.php?route=CONTROLLER/VIEW

which makes sense but the url is ugly and I was wondering if there was a way in htaccess that i can just make all the pages lose this middle portion and have it something like this

http://royaltyfreesoundbank.com/product/category&path=18

ideas anyone....thanks in advance

Answer 1

Here:

# Turn on URL re-writing
RewriteEngine On

# Clean URLs
RewriteRule ^(.+)/(.+)/([0-9]+)/?$   /index.php?route=$1/$2&path=$3    [NC,L]

Then you would access it with urls like:

http://example.com/category/product/354

Note, however, that this is a rather broad rule which will match anyfolder/anyfolder/45 as well as known category/product names, so, you may want to tweak it to limit just to known categories.