How can I redirect correctly with .htaccess?

Question

At this moment I'm working on a project for a website. I only have an issue. My .htaccess won't redirect correctly.

On my project users can register and there is an members list. The members list is sorted by A till Z and you can select it on the page like this: Click here when you click on a letter it will show you the users that are registered on that specific letter

The problem is that it won't redirect like i have it in my .htaccess

I tried many things and tried to search it but i can't find any fix

This is what the .htaccess looks like:

RewriteRule ^memberlist memberlist.php

RewriteRule ^memberlist/show/(.*) memberlist.php?show=$1

and this is in the PHP file

echo $content_1;
for($letter = 0; $letter <= 13; $letter++) {
    echo "- <a href='/memberlist/show/".$array[$letter]."'>".$array[$letter]."</a> \n";
}
echo "-<br> \n";
for($letter = 14; $letter <= 25; $letter++) {
    echo "- <a href='/memberlist/show/".$array[$letter]."'>".$array[$letter]."</a> \n";
}
echo "-<br> \n";
for($cijfer = 1; $cijfer <= 9; $cijfer++) {
    echo "- <a href='/memberlist/show/".$cijfer."'>".$cijfer."</a> \n";
}

As you can see in the code i want to redirect the users to the specific letter like this: mydomain.com/memberslist/show/A but it won't work and if i do mydomain.com/memberslist.php?show=A it will work.

Sorry for my bad english (I'm dutch)

Answer 1

The rule RewriteRule ^memberlist memberlist.php will match even for mydomain.com/memberlist/show/A because the regex ^memberlist only checks if the path starts with memberlist .

Instead write the first rule as:

RewriteRule ^memberlist$ memberlist.php

The $ signifies that after memberlist the string has to end. That means it will only match mydomain.com/memberlist

To add, you can easily test your rules with this site: https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/
It will show you which rules match a given url. Remember that the first matched rule will be chosen. That means another solution would just be to reverse your rules so that the more specific one comes first.