Removing .html extension from URL - html

So I would like to be able to go to example.com/page.html from example.com/page (without the .html extension). I've been looking around and it seems to have something to do with the .htaccess file, but I have no idea how to actually configure the rule. Thanks for the help!
Update:
I've only really tried various suggestions I found online, for example:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+(.+?)\.html[\s?] [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [R=302,L,NE]
# To internally forward /dir/file to /dir/file.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1\.html -f [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+?)/?$ /$1.html [L]

This probably is what you are looking for:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} -f
RewriteRUle ^/?(.+)\.html$ /$1 [R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}.html -f
RewriteRule ^/?(.+)/?$ /$1.html (END)
This rule will work likewise in the http servers host configuration or inside a dynamic configuration file (".htaccess" file). Obviously the rewriting module needs to be loaded inside the http server and enabled in the http host. In case you use a dynamic configuration file you need to take care that it's interpretation is enabled at all in the host configuration and that it is located in the host's DOCUMENT_ROOT folder.
And a general remark: you should always prefer to place such rules in the http servers host configuration instead of using dynamic configuration files (".htaccess"). Those dynamic configuration files add complexity, are often a cause of unexpected behavior, hard to debug and they really slow down the http server. They are only provided as a last option for situations where you do not have access to the real http servers host configuration (read: really cheap service providers) or for applications insisting on writing their own rules (which is an obvious security nightmare).
In case you get an "internal server error" (http status 500) using above rule set chances are that you operate a very old version of the apache http server. You will find a definite hint to an unsupported [END] flag in your http servers error log in that case. Either upgrade your http server to a more or less current version or try using the older [L] flag in that case, it should work the same, though that depends a bit on your setup.

URL example.com/page will be loading content from file /page.html
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [L]

Related

Why is ".html" appearing on the end of my urls in browser? [duplicate]

How to remove .html from the URL of a static page?
Also, I need to redirect any url with .html to the one without it. (i.e. www.example.com/page.html to www.example.com/page ).
I think some explanation of Jon's answer would be constructive. The following:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
checks that if the specified file or directory respectively doesn't exist, then the rewrite rule proceeds:
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]
But what does that mean? It uses regex (regular expressions). Here is a little something I made earlier...
I think that's correct.
NOTE: When testing your .htaccess do not use 301 redirects. Use 302 until finished testing, as the browser will cache 301s. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/9204355/3217306
Update: I was slightly mistaken, . matches all characters except newlines, so includes whitespace. Also, here is a helpful regex cheat sheet
Sources:
http://community.sitepoint.com/t/what-does-this-mean-rewritecond-request-filename-f-d/2034/2
https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204643270/using-htaccess-rewrite-rules
To remove the .html extension from your urls, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.]+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,L,R]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [NC,L]
NOTE: If you want to remove any other extension, for example to remove the .php extension, just replace the html everywhere with php in the code above.
Also see this How to remove .html and .php from URLs using htaccess` .
This should work for you:
#example.com/page will display the contents of example.com/page.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.html [L,QSA]
#301 from example.com/page.html to example.com/page
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
With .htaccess under apache you can do the redirect like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]
As for removing of .html from the url, simply link to the page without .html
page
You will need to make sure you have Options -MultiViews as well.
None of the above worked for me on a standard cPanel host.
This worked:
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
For those who are using Firebase hosting none of the answers will work on this page. Because you can't use .htaccess in Firebase hosting. You will have to configure the firebase.json file. Just add the line "cleanUrls": true in your file and save it. That's it.
After adding the line firebase.json will look like this :
{
"hosting": {
"public": "public",
"cleanUrls": true,
"ignore": [
"firebase.json",
"**/.*",
"**/node_modules/**"
]
}
}
Thanks for your replies. I have already solved my problem. Suppose I have my pages under http://www.yoursite.com/html, the following .htaccess rules apply.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
</IfModule>
Good question, but it seems to have confused people. The answers are almost equally divided between those who thought Dave (the OP) was saving his HTML pages without the .html extension, and those who thought he was saving them as normal (with .html), but wanting the URL to show up without. While the question could have been worded a little better, I think it’s clear what he meant. If he was saving pages without .html, his two question (‘how to remove .html') and (how to ‘redirect any url with .html’) would be exactly the same question! So that interpretation doesn’t make much sense. Also, his first comment (about avoiding an infinite loop) and his own answer seem to confirm this.
So let’s start by rephrasing the question and breaking down the task. We want to accomplish two things:
Visibly remove the .html if it’s part of the requested URL (e.g. /page.html)
Point the cropped URL (e.g. /page) back to the actual file (/page.html).
There’s nothing difficult about doing either of these things. (We could achieve the second one simply by enabling MultiViews.) The challenge here is doing them both without creating an infinite loop.
Dave’s own answer got the job done, but it’s pretty convoluted and not at all portable. (Sorry Dave.) Łukasz Habrzyk seems to have cleaned up Anmol’s answer, and finally Amit Verma improved on them both. However, none of them explained how their solutions solved the fundamental problem—how to avoid an infinite loop. As I understand it, they work because THE_REQUEST variable holds the original request from the browser. As such, the condition (RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}) only gets triggered once. Since it doesn’t get triggered upon a rewrite, you avoid the infinite loop scenario. But then you're dealing with the full HTTP request—GET, HTTP and all—which partly explains some of the uglier regex examples on this page.
I’m going to offer one more approach, which I think is easier to understand. I hope this helps future readers understand the code they’re using, rather than just copying and pasting code they barely understand and hoping for the best.
RewriteEngine on
# Remove .html (or htm) from visible URL (permanent redirect)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.+)\.html?$ [nocase]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [L,R=301]
# Quietly point back to the HTML file (temporary/undefined redirect):
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [END]
Let’s break it down…
The first rule is pretty simple. The condition matches any URL ending in .html (or .htm) and redirects to the URL without the filename extension. It's a permanent redirect to indicate that the cropped URL is the canonical one.
The second rule is simple too. The first condition will only pass if the requested filename is not a valid directory (!-d). The second will only pass if the filename refers to a valid file (-f) with the .html extension added. If both conditions pass, the rewrite rule simply adds ‘.html’ to the filename. And then the magic happens… [END]. Yep, that’s all it takes to prevent an infinite loop. The Apache RewriteRule Flags documentation explains it:
Using the [END] flag terminates not only the current round of rewrite
processing (like [L]) but also prevents any subsequent rewrite
processing from occurring in per-directory (htaccess) context.
Resorting to using .htaccess to rewrite the URLs for static HTML is generally not only unnecessary, but also bad for you website's performance. Enabling .htaccess is also an unnecessary security vulnerability - turning it off eliminates a significant number of potential issues. The same rules for each .htaccess file can instead go in a <Directory> section for that directory, and it will be more performant if you then set AllowOverride None because it won't need to check each directory for a .htaccess file, and more secure because an attacker can't change the vhost config without root access.
If you don't need .htaccess in a VPS environment, you can disable it entirely and get better performance from your web server.
All you need to do is move your individual files from a structure like this:
index.html
about.html
products.html
terms.html
To a structure like this:
index.html
about/index.html
products/index.html
terms/index.html
Your web server will then render the appropriate pages - if you load /about/, it will treat that as /about/index.html.
This won't rewrite the URL if anyone visits the old one, though, so it would need redirects to be in place if it was retroactively applied to an existing site.
I use this .htacess for removing .html extantion from my url site, please verify this is correct code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{http://www.proofers.co.uk/new} !(\.[^./]+)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_fileNAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_fileNAME} !-f
RewriteRule (.*) /$1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^.]+)\.html\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.html$ http://www.proofers.co.uk/new/$1 [R=301,L]
Making my own contribution to this question by improving the answer from #amit-verma (https://stackoverflow.com/a/34726322/2837434) :
In my case I had an issue where RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f was triggering (believing the file existed) even when I was not expecting it :
%{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html was giving me /var/www/example.com/page.html for all these cases :
www.example.com/page (expected)
www.example.com/page/ (also quite expected)
www.example.com/page/subpage (not expected)
So the file it was trying to load (believing if was /var/www/example.com/page.html) were :
www.example.com/page => /var/www/example/page.html (ok)
www.example.com/page/ => /var/www/example/page/.html (not ok)
www.example.com/page/subpage => /var/www/example/page/subpage.html (not ok)
Only the first one is actually pointing to an existing file, other requests were giving me 500 errors as it kept believing the file existed and appending .html repeatedly.
The solution for me was to replace RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f with RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI}.html -f
Here is my entire .htaccess (I also added a rule to redirect the user from /index to /) :
# Redirect "/page.html" to "/page" (only if "/pages.html" exists)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /(.+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.html$ /$1 [NC,R=301,L]
# redirect "/index" to "/"
RewriteRule ^index$ / [NC,R=301,L]
# Load "/page.html" when requesting "/page" (only if "/pages.html" exists)
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ /%{REQUEST_URI}.html [QSA,L]
Here is a result example to help you understand all the cases :
Considering I have only 2 html files on my server (index.html & page.html)
www.example.com/index.html => redirects to www.example.com
www.example.com/index => redirects to www.example.com
www.example.com => renders /var/www/example.com/index.html
www.example.com/page.html => redirects to www.example.com/page
www.example.com/page => renders /var/www/example.com/page.html
www.example.com/page/subpage => returns 404 not found
www.example.com/index.html/ => returns 404 not found
www.example.com/page.html/ => returns 404 not found
www.example.com/test.html => returns 404 not found
No more 500 errors 🚀
Also, just to help you debug your redirections, consider disabling the network cache in your browser (as old 301 redirections my be in cache, wich may cause some headaches 😅):
first create a .htaccess file and set contents to -
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
next remove .html from all your files eg. test.html became just test and also if you wanna open a file from another file then also remove .html from it and just file name
Use a hash tag.
May not be exactly what you want but it solves the problem of removing the extension.
Say you have a html page saved as about.html and you don't want that pesky extension you could use a hash tag and redirect to the correct page.
switch(window.location.hash.substring(1)){
case 'about':
window.location = 'about.html';
break;
}
Routing to yoursite.com#about will take you to yoursite.com/about.html. I used this to make my links cleaner.
To remove the .html extension from your URLs, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :
#mode_rerwrite start here
RewriteEngine On
# does not apply to existing directores, meaning that if the folder exists on server then don't change anything and don't run the rule.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#Check for file in directory with .html extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html !-f
#Here we actually show the page that has .html extension
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [NC,L]
Thanks
For this, you have to rewrite the URL from /page.html to /page
You can easily implement this on any extension like .html .php etc
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
You will get a URL something like this:
example.com/page.html to example.com/page
Please note both URLs below will be accessible
example.com/page.html and example.com/page
If you don't want to show page.html
Try this
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
More info here
If you have a small static website and HTML files are in the root directory.
Open every HTML file and make the next changes:
Replace href="index.html" with href="/".
Remove .html in all local links. For example: "href="about.html"" should look like "href="about"".
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* https://example.com/html/%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
it might work because its working in my case
RewriteRule /(.+)(\.html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
Try this :) don't know if it works.

File and folder with same name

How do I make it so this:
www.example.com/services
Will point to this file:
/services.html
but this:
www.example.com/services/pocket-pool
Will point to this directory:
/services/pocket-pool.html
I have these rewrite rules in my .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^/?([^\.]+)$ $1.html [L]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Thanks!
Well, your nearly have your solution, you just have to extend it to take care of the second situation you want to handle:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^/?([^\.]+)$ $1.html [L]
RewriteRule ^/?services/(\w+)/?$ /services/$1 [END]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
In case you receive an internal server error (http status 500) using the rule above then chances are that you operate a very old version of the apache http server. You will see a definite hint to an unsupported [END] flag in your http servers error log file in that case. You can either try to upgrade or use the older [L] flag, it probably will work the same in this situation, though that depends a bit on your setup.
This rule will work likewise in the http servers host configuration or inside a dynamic configuration file (".htaccess" file). Obviously the rewriting module needs to be loaded inside the http server and enabled in the http host. In case you use a dynamic configuration file you need to take care that it's interpretation is enabled at all in the host configuration and that it is located in the host's DOCUMENT_ROOT folder.
And a general remark: you should always prefer to place such rules in the http servers host configuration instead of using dynamic configuration files (".htaccess"). Those dynamic configuration files add complexity, are often a cause of unexpected behavior, hard to debug and they really slow down the http server. They are only provided as a last option for situations where you do not have access to the real http servers host configuration (read: really cheap service providers) or for applications insisting on writing their own rules (which is an obvious security nightmare).

Automatically Rewrite html,php,css or any file extension using htaccess?

is there a way to automatically remove the file extension from the url?
for ex:
the user types
www.website.com/page.html
it will automatically convert the page to:
www.website.com/page
and if possible with a /:
www.website.com/page/
it must be automatic that the .htaccess will force the url to rewrite the file extension.
You try to do this wrong way. You do not want to remove extensions. You want to rewrite extensionless requests to real files. So if user type
http://foo.bar/file
your server would serve as it was requested
http://foo.bar/file.html
To do this you need mod_rewrite (or equivalent) and set rewriting rules according to your needs. The same module is also used to make URLs looking nicer, so instead of
http://foo.bar/script.php?id=34&smth=abc
you can have
http://foo.bar/script/id/34/smth/abc
or even
http://foo.bar/script/34/abc
Read more on mod rewrite.
I use this in .htaccess (index.php is handling the pages):
RewriteRule ^home/$ index.php?page=home
// Result: http://domain.com/home/
If you want it more dynamic:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ index.php?page=$1
// Result: http://domain.com/any-page/
For more data you might need when requesting a page:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/$ index.php?page=$1&id=$2
// Result: http://domain.com/data-page/15/
If you want to just get the called page without the index part:
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.php
To remove extensions the user adds:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
You need to do 2 things. First you need to change all of your links to the URLs without extensions, then you need to create a 301 redirect to redirect browsers and bots that still may have the old URLs with extensions to the new nice looking ones. This a server response of a new location, it's not a rewrite (which is an on-the-server-only internal URI rewrite).
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|HEAD)\ /(.*)\.(html?|php)
RewriteRule ^ /%2/ [L,R=301]
This makes it so when someone types http://www.website.com/page.html in their browser, they get redirected to http://www.website.com/page/ and the new URL will appear in the browser's URL address bar.
Now the second thing you need to do is internally change it back to the valid resource, since /page/ doesn't exist, it'll return a 404.
# need these so we don't clobber legit requests, just pass them through
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
# now check the extensions
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.*?)/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.php -f
RewriteRule ^ /%1.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.*?)/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.html -f
RewriteRule ^ /%1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.*?)/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.htm -f
RewriteRule ^ /%1.htm [L]
You'll just need to put these in the htaccess file in your document root.

How to force http- NOT https using htaccess

I have ONE directory for my entire domain that I want to force https, which is "/docs". In the /docs folder, I have the following htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
This is forcing https to everything in the /docs directory, which is what I want it to do. The problem I am having is trying to force REMOVE https back to http for all other areas of my site. In the root folder of the site (which is running wordpress), I have the following htaccess file:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/docs/?.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Unfortunately, this is not working. I can still access other areas of my site over https.
What do I need to change to get this to work correctly?
Since the accepted answer doesn't actually answer the question, I figured I'd post my solution to this. Add this to your .htaccess file to force HTTP instead of HTTPS:
# BEGIN Force HTTP
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 443
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END Force HTTP
Try the Force non-SSL plugin for wordpress.
The "WordPress Force HTTP" plugin was the only thing that worked for me. It changes https to http for not just the front page like most of the answers out there, but also changes https to http for all sub-directories in your website.
https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-force-http/
Why do you need to revert back to http? If you have the proper SSL certificates you might as well keep your access secure. Unless you are concerned about the load on your system.
I know this is not answering the question, but I want to emphasize that the question is asking on how to do a bad practice, which shouldn't be done in the first place.

.htaccess rewriterule /state/city/

This will take a bit of explanation so I hope I don't lose everyone here.
I needed to get something like the following:
http://example.com/results.html?state=iowa&city=davenport
turned into:
http://example.com/iowa/davenport/
I was able to accomplish this with the use of these two rewriterules:
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ cities.html?state=$1 RewriteRule
^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ results.html?state=$1&city=$2
The problem is that in the backend there is "some code somewhere" that is getting broken as a result of the second rewriterule. It has to do with filling in a select box based on the results of another one selected (I don't think that matters though). I think the problem is in that I'm modifying too broadly the /state/city.
Here is a copy of my full (modified for security) .htaccess file:
IndexIgnore *
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .html .htm
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ cities.html?state=$1
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ results.html?state=$1&city=$2
<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
<IfModule mod_suphp.c>
suPHP_ConfigPath /home/USER
<Files php.ini>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
The code that its screwing up is very complex and its someone else's code. After a couple of hours I've been unable to wade through all of their stuff to even come close to what I may be able to change on their end to get things working.
Does anyone have ANY ideas on what I could do to avoid this problem? I really only have 3 .html files that I'm funneling my frontend code through so I had tried something like a
my rewriterules
and same with using just "files" instead of filesMatch. Everything I've come up with breaks something else or the entire site in one way or another.
First: (i) hostgator won't enable or give you access to rewrite logs; (ii) your suPHP config has syntax errors and hostgator almost certainly does spme of this and the .htacess / php.ini denials in its own root / vhost configs. However, I'll focus on the mod_rewrite elements:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ cities.html?state=$1
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ results.html?state=$1&city=$2
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
I am also assuming that you don't have any .htaccess files in subdirectories with the rewrite engine enabled as these could preempt this under rewrite "Per Directory" precedence rules.
Rules (3) is a simple domain redirector. Rule (4) is a draconian: redirect any URI which is not an existing file or directory to index.php in the current directory, but leaving the query string intact.
Rule (1) and (2) are your new rules. As Mike says, you should include the [L] but since the files cities.html and results.html exist it won't match anyway.
I am curious as to why the trailing slach in the URIs is optional. Better to decide and to fix this.
The issue is that the match criteria for (1) and (2) are two broad and are picking up URIs intended for the general catchall (4). You need to lock this down to make these mutually exclusive. One why is to mine your access logs (which are available with hostgator) to find the standard URIs which the application expects and check that none match (1) or (2) -- However, since most will include a ".", this probably isn't the case. But check.
The other issue is whether the existing scripts use absolute or relative references e.g. <img src="images/myimage.png"> in any output HTML. Here the browser has asked for http://www.example.com/texas/houston say and will therefore look for http://www.example.com/texas/images/myimage.png which doesn't match (1), (2) or (3) and therefore is caught by (4) and passed to /index.php. Ditto CSS files etc. Hence they won't 404 and index.php will get confused and send some default response which will hopelessly confuse the browser.
However, again analysis of the access logs (in this case or USIs with a referrer http://www.example.com/texas/houston) will show you if this is going on.
If your app uses standard subdirectories then you might be able to fix this by a rule (3.1) which looks something like
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond $1/$2 -f
RewriteRule .*?(images|css|styles)/(.+) $1/$2 [L]
though the details will depend on the rest of your application.
I was able to solve it by changing my (relevant) .htaccess entries to the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ cities.html?state=$1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/signup/
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ results.html?state=$1&city=$2
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
The addition being:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/signup/
HostGator was able to find that the issue was /signup somewhere in a log somewhere, never did find out which log they were able to look at but I assume it was something I didn't have access to.