Simple wild character for mod_rewrite?

Question

new to mod_rewrite. I simply want to make something like this:

# Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteEngine On    

# use item php page to show the item
RewriteRule    ^parts/./[.]$    parts/item.php?id=$1    [NC]    

so when a person types in example.com/parts/anything/anything, the URL will go to

example.com/parts/item.php?id=the2ndanything

From my understanding, the period means any character. Also, I tried to add a + after the period(which should mean as much as anything), but that still didn't work.

by the way, I am on a temporary URL, since I have not changed my previous web host yet, and therefore my actual full URL has a ~ in it. I am hoping this is not an issue for mod_rewriting and therefore being the issue that stops it from working. the .htaccess file is in the root folder with the web sites index.html.

Answer 1

The . does mean any character , but you must follow it by + (one or more) or * (zero or more) and you must capture it in () to be used as $1 . Use [^/]+ to match all characters up to but not including / to match but not capture the first directory after parts/ .

RewriteEngine On
# (.*) captures the second "anything" in $1
RewriteRule ^parts/[^/]+/(.*)$ parts/item.php?id=$1 [L]