htaccess to rewrite the original URL

Question

I am creating SEO friendly URLs for my website. I have a file notfound.php to which I am redirecting all the URLs. Now, I want notfound.php to search for the URL in database and generate the corresponding content.

But the problem is that in the URL it shows is http://some_url/notfound.php I don't want this URL to be displayed in the address bar, instead I want the original one.

For example,

http://some_url/hello/world is redirecting to http://some_url/notfound.php using ErrorDocument 404 and notfound.php is serving the content

But how to show http://some_url/hello/world in the URL instead of notfound.php? And, is this the right way to redirect and rewrite while matching the URLs from a database?

Answer 1

you must have mod_rewrite enabled, then you can try:

RewriteEngine on    
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^ notfound.php [L]

the first two lines ensure that you can still load things that exist (like js and css files that you may need)

Answer 2

ErrorDocument does an external redirect when you give it a complete URL. The doc tells you how to do an internal redirect.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/custom-error.html#configuration