.htaccess SEO Friendly URLs not working with two parameters

Question

I am trying to create SEO friendly URLs for my site and I have come to problem that I can´t solve. I can´t figure out how to setup the rewrite rule so it will show for example like this www.mysite.com/shows/late-night and www.mysite.com/news/title-of-article. Here is my htaccess file:

 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteRule ^(.*)/([a-z_-]+) index.php?switch=$1&shows=$2 [NC,L] 
 RewriteRule ^(.*)/([a-z_-]+) index.php?switch=$1&article=$2 [NC,L] 
 RewriteRule ^shows/$ index.php?switch=shows [NC,L]
 RewriteRule ^articles/$ index.php?switch=article [NC,L]

The rewrite rule works if I comment out the first and the third line, but how I do so both will work.

Answer 1

1st and 2nd rule cannot coexist because they are matching same URI pattern. Only first will all the time. Tweak your rules like this:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^(shows)/([a-z_-]+)/?$ index.php?switch=$1&shows=$2 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^(news)/([a-z_-]+)/?$ index.php?switch=$1&article=$2 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^(shows|news|articles)/?$ index.php?switch=$1 [NC,L,QSA]