Attempting an advanced htaccess rewrite trick, having difficulties - url

Question

Hey guys, here's what I'm attempting:
I'd like to make it so I can turn all url variables and values into folders, all with one rule. I was expecting to find some way to do this:
www.example.com/var1/val1/var2/val2/varN/valN
In an ideal world I could get rewrite to this:
www.example.com/index.php?var1=val1&var2=val2&varN=valN
But I'm also happy to do something like this:
www.example.com/index.php?path=/var1/val1/var2/val2/varN/valN
And then work them into an array or structure in PHP. In my case everything works through index.php so that's a constant.
Is there any way to do this? I can't find anything through google and apparently I can't figure it out for myself!
Thanks guys :-)

Answer 1

This is something copied almost verbatim from a <Directory> directive in my main apache config. I have been unable to do so, but ought to work in .htaccess as well (probably without the <Directory> parts).
<Directory /path/to/document/root/>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?path=$1 [QSA]
</Directory>
The URL http://www.any.com/foo/bar/baz/spam/eggs should become http://www.any.com/index.php?path=/foo/bar/baz/spam/eggs

Answer 2

Try this rule:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule !^index\.php$ index.php?path=%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
That will rewrite any request except for index.php to index.php.
And if you want to exclude existing files and directories, add these RewriteCond directives to your rule:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule !^index\.php$ index.php?path=%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
And here’s a rule for the former format, except that the parameters have the form var[]:
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)(.*)$ /$3?$1[]=$2 [N,QSA]

Answer 3

Gumbo, I'm really liking this solution, it works perfectly:
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)(.*)$ /$3?$1[]=$2 [N,QSA]
I get the feeling I need to stick something like !(js|css) in there to exclude those folders, but I can't figure out where, I've tried a couple places to no avail. Do you have a tweak for that? Thanks again for the killer solution!
Edit: I figured it out, or found it rather!
I put this before the rewrite rule:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(.+).css$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(.+).js$
Finally, it looks like this, and works perfectly:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(.+).css$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(.+).js$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)(.*)$ /$3?$1[]=$2 [N,QSA]
My favorite aspect of this solution is that I can pass url arrays, so:
www.any.com/var1/val1/var1/val2/
Actually creates
$var1= array("val1","val2");