.htaccess url rewrite and removing [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• htaccess rewrite replace space with - 1 answer

Hi Im very new at the rewriting thing. I have an Apache host that is hosting my website and I need to make the url rewrite to make it just look better than it currently is.

So I have this link http://www.kalah.co.za/content.php?page=Civil%20Tactical%20Training and i want it to look like http://www.kalah.co.za/Civil-Tactical-Training.html

Now I can do the first bit I guess with this code

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)\.html$ /content.php?page=$1 [L]

But I need to also remove or replace the - things. I don't know what is more SEO friendly and any suggestions and advice / recommendations will be appreciated.

PS: Also is the .htaccess from a windows server and apache server different in terms of re-writes ?

Answer 1

You can have these rules in your root .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# external redirect from actual URL to pretty one (remove query string)
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+content\.php\?page=([^\s&]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ %1? [R=302,L,NE]

# convert all space (%20) to hyphen
RewriteRule "^(\S*) +(\S* .*)$" $1-$2 [N,NE]
RewriteRule "^(\S*) (\S*)$" $1-$2 [L,R=302,NE]

# rewrite rule to call actual PHP handler
RewriteRule ^([^./]+)\.html$ content.php?page=$1 [L,QSA,NC]