Mod-rewrites on apache: change all URLs - regex

Question

Right now I'm doing something like this:
RewriteRule ^/?logout(/)?$ logout.php
RewriteRule ^/?config(/)?$ config.php
I would much rather have one rules that would do the same thing for each url, so I don't have to keep adding them every time I add a new file.
Also, I like to match things like '/config/new' to 'config_new.php' if that is possible. I am guessing some regexp would let me accomplish this?

Answer 1

Try:
RewriteRule ^/?(\w+)/?$ $1.php
the $1 is the content of the first captured string in brackets. The brackets around the 2nd slash are not needed.
edit: For the other match, try this:
RewriteRule ^/?(\w+)/(\w+)/?$ $1_$2.php

Answer 2

I would do something like this:
RewriteRule ^/?(logout|config|foo)/?$ $1.php
RewriteRule ^/?(logout|config|foo)/(new|edit|delete)$ $1_$2.php
I prefer to explicitly list the url's I want to match, so that I don't have to worry about static content or adding new things later that don't need to be rewritten to php files.
The above is ok if all sub url's are valid for all root url's (book/new, movie/new, user/new), but not so good if you want to have different sub url's depending on root action (logout/new doesn't make much sense). You can handle that either with a more complex regex, or by routing everything to a single php file which will determine what files to include and display based on the url.

Answer 3

Mod rewrite can't do (potentially) boundless replaces like you want to do in the second part of your question. But check out the External Rewriting Engine at the bottom of the Apache URL Rewriting Guide:
External Rewriting Engine
Description:
A FAQ: How can we solve the FOO/BAR/QUUX/etc. problem? There seems no solution by the use of mod_rewrite...
Solution:
Use an external RewriteMap, i.e. a program which acts like a RewriteMap. It is run once on startup of Apache receives the requested URLs on STDIN and has to put the resulting (usually rewritten) URL on STDOUT (same order!).
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap quux-map prg:/path/to/map.quux.pl
RewriteRule ^/~quux/(.*)$ /~quux/${quux-map:$1}
#!/path/to/perl
# disable buffered I/O which would lead
# to deadloops for the Apache server
$| = 1;
# read URLs one per line from stdin and
# generate substitution URL on stdout
while (<>) {
s|^foo/|bar/|;
print $_;
}
This is a demonstration-only example and just rewrites all URLs /~quux/foo/... to /~quux/bar/.... Actually you can program whatever you like. But notice that while such maps can be used also by an average user, only the system administrator can define it.