Rewrite URLs with .htaccess but ignore specific Directories - apache

Question

I have a directory on a site:
http://example.com/directory/
In it I have a .htaccess file.
I want it to take any URL like this:
http://example.com/directory/section/day/
And rewrite it to:
http://example.com/directory/index.php?arg1=section&arg2=day
Except for any URLs that refer to these directories:
http://example.com/directory/css/
http://example.com/directory/javascript/
http://example.com/directory/images/
I have the first part working, but unable to tell it to exclude files in certain directories:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+) index.php?arg1=$1&arg2=$2 [NC]
Update:
This works in a very basic and simple sense:
RewriteRule ^css - [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^javascript - [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^images - [L,NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+) index.php?arg1=$1&arg2=$2 [NC]
but I'm sure there is a more elegant solution?

Answer 1

I think the keyword you're looking for is RewriteCond. It's pretty similar to what you ended up with.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(css|javascript|images)
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+) index.php?arg1=$1&arg2=$2 [NC]

Answer 2

You might be able to use RewriteCond to check if an actual file exists... at least, I use this for websites when I want things like CSS, Javascripts, and images to be accessible (without the request being redirected.)
Here's the line I use:
# only rewrite if the requested file doesn't exist
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
Let me know if that works for you!