Use .htaccess to rewrite requests for a PNG as a PHP GET variable

Question

I'm REALLY bad with .htaccess files, and reading through the existing questions on SO only confuse me more (mainly because they're all situation-specific and don't exactly apply to my situation at hand). I'm making a script that generates dynamic images through PHP. The script takes 1 variable, which makes the URL look like this:

http://www.example.com/script/image.php?name=esqew

However, I'd like to utilize an .htaccess file to rewrite the file to something more elegant and something my users can use on forums, like so:

http://www.example.com/script/esqew.png

The question, in a nutshell, is how do I rewrite the first request above to something more elegant like the second example using .htaccess?

Answer 1

Please the following in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^script/(\w+)\.png$ script/image.php?name=$1 [L]

This assumes name is at least 1 alphanumeric or underscore character. It will also only work for png extensions.

Answer 2

Use this code in .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^(script)/([^.]*)\.png$ $1/image.php?name=$2 [L,NC]