RewriteRule not working fine - apache

Question

I wrote the following rule in .htaccess
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ profile.php?business=$1
When i enter the URL like
http://www.abc.com/mujeeb/
page is correctly transfered to profiles page and page looks fine.
But i enter this in URL
http://www.abc.com/mujeeb
page doesn't show.
Can you please tell why? Or write the rule for this? i tried many times but not sucessful.
Mujeeb.

Answer 1

page doesn't show. because you specified that you RewriteRule is applied to the URL's ending with / at the end. Rewrite it as
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ profile.php?business=$1 [L]
And I hope that you have additional RewriteCond statements in order to prevent the infinite loop with redirects.
ps: basically you can prevent loop in two way
1) checks that requested url does not correspond to the existing file or directory. it is, probably, the best way to do (read comments to the second method)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ profile.php?business=$1 [L]
2) checks that you are requesting not the file from RewriteRule. This method is not good, because for each request, even for existing files and directories, it calls profile.php script
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !profile\.php$
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ profile.php?business=$1 [L]

Answer 2

It is because you check for the trailing slash with ^(.*)/$. If you add a question mark, the trailing slash will be optional.
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ profile.php?business=$1
The RewriteCond is neccessary to make sure the Rule will only be applied once. Otherwise Apache will be caught in an infinite loop.

Answer 3

Try this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)[/]?$ profile.php?business=$1
That makes the last slash optional.

Answer 4

Well you rule is checking for a trailing slash in URI and that's the reason /mujeeb/ works but /mujeeb does not. Change your code to:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
# Turn mod_rewrite on
RewriteEngine On
# If the request is not for a valid file
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# If the request is not for a valid directory
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
# your rule without trailing slash
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ profile.php?business=$1 [L,QSA]

Answer 5

Plenty of good answers already. My answer is a bit different.
This is what I usually do. If the requested URL doesn't end with a /, I make the browser redirect to a URL with the trailing /. This is consistent with the default behaviour of Apache (due to mod_dir). So, this is how I solve this problem.
RewriteEngine On
# Canonicalize http://example.com/mujeeb to http://example.com/mujeeb/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)([^/])$ /$1$2/ [R=307,L]
# Let profile.php process http://example.com/mujeeb/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ profile.php?business=$1