"Friendly URLs" rule in .htaccess interfering with some directories

Question

My .htaccess is set up to remove .html from URLs as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

This is causing problems with the file /help.html, which now gives a 403 Forbidden error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /help/.html on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while 
trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Is there a way to keep friendly URLs and make the help page work?

Answer 1

Try this

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /help 
 RewriteRule . - [L]
RewriteRule ^([^\]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

I added a condition to your .htaccess to check if the Requested URI contains /help ,then it will be passed unchanged to its destination.