Htaccess URL rewrite domain with wildcard - apache

Question

I'm using htaccess to manage friendly urls
My friendly URL looks like this:
www.example.com/p/12345/John-Smith
12345 is the ID number, /p/ doesn't change, and the name is irrelevant bit of friendly url. My background url looks like this:
www.example.com/page.php?id=12345
My htaccess looks like this:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^p/([0-9]+)/([^/\.]+)?$ details.php?id=$1 [L]
Everything works like a charm.
However, what I really want my htaccess to look like is below. The only different is the ^(.*)/p/ versus just ^p.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/p/([0-9]+)/([^/\.]+)?$ page.php?id=$1 [L]
Basically, I want to ensure that only a directory of /p/ in the url triggers this particular htaccess rule and not something unintended, like example.com/gdp/12345/abc
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why this isn't working!
Thanks in advance as always.

Answer 1

Your rule RewriteRule ^(.*)/p/([0-9]+)/([^/\.]+)?$ page.php?id=$1 [L] has some issues.
You're not backreferencing the correct id: The first ( ) matches what is before the /p/ so $1 will backreference that, and not the id.
URI's passed through rewrite rules when they are in and .htaccess file have the leading / stripped off, so the regex ^(.*)/p/ will never match something like http://www.example.com/p/1234 because the URI that is being passed into the rule is p/1234.
The other weird thing in your rules is you redirect everything to http://www.example.com/ which seems like it would be a redirect loop, but if that works for you then that's fine.
To deal with 1 and 2 you need to change your backreference to $2 and your regex to accomodate a p/1234 URI:
RewriteRule (^|/)p/([0-9]+)/([^/\.]+)?$ page.php?id=$2 [L]
The (^|/) says that either it's the beginning of the URI (for p/1234) or it's a slash (for /something/p/1234).