.htaccess RedirectMatch conditional regex fails - regex

Question

Good evening dear fellow coders,
I am trying to handle urls without file extensions that are more readable to average internet users using a .htaccess redirect, like http://example.com/file to http://example.com/file.php (with or without query)
Unfortunately I am not able to use mod_rewrite, but although redirect does work, it seems not to be able to handle my request properly.
To handle any given URL I tried using
RedirectMatch ^/(?(?=.*\.php(?i).*)|(\w+)(.*)) /$1.php$2
And
RedirectMatch ^/.*\.php(?i).*|(\w+)(.*) /$1.php$2
As well as using $2 and $3, assuming the behaviour might extract the first pattern contrary to every knowledge.
It should extract characters and numbers for $1 and everything else for $2 (starting with ? for queries etc.) unless it contains the file extension .php.
Validating the regex with https://regex101.com/r/zF2bV9/2 everything should work fine, but implementing one of these lines to the .htaccess the filename will replace any given file with ".php" (as in http://example.com/.php) and obviously produce an error of a non-existing file.
What am I missing about the code or the redirect functionality?

Answer 1

You can try something like:
RedirectMatch ^/([^.]+)$ /$1.php
This matches the URL providing there is not already a dot (ie. .php) in the URL. And so prevents a redirect loop.
As mentioned in comments, you don't need to do anything specific with the query string, providing you want it passed through to the destination unaltered. The query string is not present in the URL-path that the RedirectMatch directive matches against anyway. So, any manipulation of the query string would require mod_rewrite.