.htaccess rewrite regex: match anything but “index”

Question

I\'m trying to create a rule used in a .htaccess file to match anything but a particular string, in this case: index.

I thought that it sho

Answer 1

Apache used three different regular expression implementations. The first was System V8, since Apache 1.3 they used POSIX ERE and since Apache 2 they use PCRE. And only PCRE supports look-ahead assertions. So you need Apache 2 to use that rule.

But now to your question. If you use this rule:

RewriteRule ^index/ - [L]

anything that starts with /index/ should be catched by this rule and no further rule should be applied.

But if that doesn’t work, try this:

RewriteRule !^index/ …

Again, this rule will be applied on any request that’s URL path doesn’t start with /index/.

And if you want to capture anything from the URL, use a RewriteCond condition to test either the full URL path itself (%{REQUEST_URI}) or just the match of one of your pattern groups:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index/
RewriteRule (.*) …
# or
RewriteCond $1 !^index$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/(.*) …