url rewriting in .htaccess - regex

Question

I am trying to serve different urls using mod_rewrite but whatever I try it is just not working.
An example url would be
http://www.site.com/country/tours/dynamic-part/?&city=new-york,los-angeles
And I am trying to change the url using .htaccess to:
http://www.site.com/country/tours/dynamic-part/new-york,los-angeles
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)city=([^&]*)(&|$)
RewriteRule ^country\/tours\/([a-zA-Z0-9]*)\/.+city=([^\/]*)$ http://www.site.com/country/tours/$1/$2 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Any ideas? I though I was close but not anymore :/

Answer 1

The RewriteRule does NOT match the query string, see
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html#what_is_matched
So the .+city part of the rule will never match.
This should work tho...
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)city=([^&]*)(&|$)
RewriteRule ^country\/tours\/([a-zA-Z0-9]*)\/ http://www.site.com/country/tours/$1/%2 [L,R=301]
The subsitution can read back-referenecs to the RewriteCond pattern.