Rewrite rule with pagination .htaccess - regex

Question

I have a URL like this:
http://example.com/category/title which comes from the link http://example.com/cview.php?url=title
I want to create pagination and to be like http://example.com/category/title/page/1 or
http://example.com/category/title/1
this comes from http://example.com/cview.php?url=title&pageno=1.
I have tried this in .htaccess without success
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^category/([^/]*)$/([^/]+)/?$ /cview.php?url=$2&pageno=$1 [L]
Can anyone help please?

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^category/([^/]*)$/([^/]+)/?$ /cview.php?url=$2&pageno=$1 [L]
You have an erroneous $ (end-of-string anchor) in the middle of the RewriteRule pattern. You also appear to have the backreferences $1 and $2 the wrong way round. You are also allowing an optional trailing slash, yet your example URLs do not use this. (An optional trailing slash potentially creates a duplicate content issue.)
If you allow both /category/title/page/1 and /category/title/1 then you are potentially creating a duplicate content issue. Presumably you are only linking to one of these URL formats?
Since the page number is a "number" then it makes sense to just match numbers, rather than anything - this also helps to avoid conflicts with other directives.
It doesn't look like you need the conditions (RewriteCond directives) that check the request does not map to a file or directory, since I wouldn't expect a request of the form /category/title/page/1 to map to a file or directory anyway?
Try the following instead (without the RewriteCond directives):
RewriteRule ^category/([^/]+)(?:/page)?/(\d+)$ /cview.php?url=$1&pageno=$2 [L]
This matches both /category/title/page/<num> and /category/title/<num>. The optional subpattern (?:/page) is non-capturing, so that it doesn't mess up the numbering of the backreferences.
Bear in mind also that the order of the rules in .htaccess is important in order to avoid conflicts.