Hide file extension with htaccess

Question

I'm not the best with mod rewrite so if anybody can help me out here that would be great.

I'm using a markdown processor script and it's using rewrite to grab any files that end with a markdown file type. However, I'd like this script to grab any files within a folder, rather than any files that end with the markdown file type.

Here's the htaccess :

# display Markdown as HTML by default
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule .+\.(markdown|mdown|md|mkd)$ /static/includes/markdown/render.php
RewriteRule .+\.(markdown|mdown|md|mkd)\-text$ /static/includes/markdown/render.php [L]

Is there a way to grab all files within a folder called (let's say) "folder" and eliminate the file type on the end?

So maybe have a URL like

website.com/home 

that actually is

website.com/home.md

and is processed with the markdown script?

Hope this makes sense.

Answer 1

The re-write module and it's .htaccess files actually work on a per folder basis. Usually one would have a main .htaccess file in the web root of a site/server. However you can add numerous .htaccess files throughout your site's folder structure giving each individual folder specific rules.

All you would have to do is add another .htaccess file to your markdown folder and enable it to parse URL's without file extensions, forwarding it to a script which will be able to detect what original file was requested -

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /static/includes/markdown/render.php?file=$1 [L,QSA]

Basically what is happening here is that any file requested within this folder will be passed through your render.php file.

Now in your render.php file, you would have a $_GET parameter of file containing the original URL. For a url of http://example.com/markdown/foo , your render.php would have foo in the file parameter -

 /static/includes/markdown/render.php?file=foo

If you set the correct headers in render.php it will be able to print out any format of file, hiding it's extension in a "fake" URL.