RewriteRule accepts numbers but not letters in tag

Question

RewriteRule only works with numbers

I currently try to get the link

example.com/subdir/StackExchange/

to act as a link with e.g. an additional website tag:

example.com/subdir?website=StackExchange

---

I set up a RewriteRule in the .htaccess that looks as following:

RewriteRule ^subdir/(.*)/$ subdir.php?website=$1 [L]

When I use numbers (example.com/subdir/123/), echo $_GET["website"] successfully echoes "123". As soon as I use alphabetical letters (example.com/subdir/abc/) it does not work.

How do I get this changed? Is this an issue with WordPress? I have set the permalink option in the WordPress Settings Dashboard to "Post name". I tried other methods, too, but nothing has changed.

Answer 1

Leave .htaccess alone. You can use WordPress rewrite API for this.

add_action( 'init', function(){
    return add_rewrite_rule(
        'subdir/([^/]+)/?$', // ([^/]+) takes alphanumeric, while ([0-9]+) accepts digits
        'index.php?pagename=subdir&website=$matches[1]',
        'top'
    );
});

add_filter('query_vars', function($v){ return array_merge(array('website'),$v); });

First make sure subdir is a valid page slug, in this example. After you save that code to your child theme's functions file or plugin, you can now use get_query_var('website') to get the website property rather than using $_GET global.

Hope that helps.