Mod Rewrite Wilcard Subdomain - Internal Pages - apache

Question

i am able to get subdomain variables (product name and language) with php via $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]
http://product.en.example.com
I do not know how to make to work in browser these urls for internal pages:
product.en.example.com/images
product.en.example.com/images/john
product.en.example.com/hobbies
product.en.example.com/hobbies/smith
images, hobbies = pageType
john, smith = peopleName
I think i should get the pageType via php query strings (GET) and serve the corresponding layout.
In .htaccess i have:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index\.php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.+?)\.(.+?)\.example\.com/$
RewriteRule (.+).(.+)\.example\.com\/(.*) /index.php [L]

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to achieve this. First of all you can parse the request uri in php using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] which contains the requested URI.
An alternative is to use your .htaccess file. In this case you would not even have to parse the server name in php:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*?)\.?([^\.]+?)\.example\.com$
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)?/?(.*?)/?$ /index.php?product=%1&language=%2&pageType=$1&peopleName=$2 [L]
Note that I added the rule RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f instead of your check against index.php because this way you can serve assets like your css files without having them redirected to index.php.
Beware that HTTP_HOST has no trailing slash.
EDIT
As requirested in the comments:
In order to add another optional parameter you can use ([^/]*)?/?. Therefore the RewriteRule could look like:
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)?/?([^/]*)?/?(.*?)/?$ /index.php?product=%1&language=%2&pageType=$1&peopleName=$2&peopleAge=$3 [L]