How to handle RewriteRules when the word has similar first characters? - regex

Question

I have been trying to figure it out for a hours now, yet, always one of my redirects does not work. I have path something.com/blog/article-name and something.com/blogujeme to act as a article list. But I cannot get those two redirects to work, since they share the same first characters and regex fails me. So far what I came up with is:
RewriteRule ^(?!blog\?)(blogujeme)$ blog/category-view.php
RewriteRule ^(?!blogujeme\?)(blog) blog/page-view.php
The first rewrite rule actually works, but the second does not and redirects to something.com/blog instead of something.com/blogujeme
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You can use regular expressions and a few Apache mod_rewrite directives to achieve what you want. You'll have to use a condition to check if the request is a file and if it is, then process the file rather than continue with the rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^blog/.*$ blog/page-view.php [L]
RewriteRule ^blogujeme$ blog/category-view.php [L]
Then you'll have:
/blog -> blog/page-view.php
/blogujeme -> blog/category-view.php
/blog/page-view.php -> blog/page-view.php
/blog/category-view.php -> blog/category-view.php

Answer 2

But I cannot get to work those two redirects, since they share same
first characters and regex fails me
You should not have any problem like this with a regular expression, since your 2 examples can be differentiated. Actually, your issue is about mod_rewrite rules syntax/semantic.
Here is what you need to write in your htaccess (which has to be in root folder in this case)
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f # prevent from infinite loop
RewriteRule ^blog/.+$ blog/page-view.php [L]
RewriteRule ^blogujeme$ blog/category-view.php [L]

Answer 3

Shooting from the hip - how about a word boundary anchor?
RewriteRule \bblogujeme$ blog/category-view.php
RewriteRule \bblog\b.* blog/page-view.php

Answer 4

The simplest answer to "what are you doing wrong" is not to use [L] as an indicator to mod_rewrite to STOP and be satisfied when it has hit a match.
Order your "similar" regular expressions in an order where the most specific one goes first. If that hits and has a [L] in the end, then no more rules will run.
If it doesn't hit, the next one will be tried. Thus they can be seen as
"if, else if, etc.."