Codeigniter and .htaccess mod rewrite - .htaccess

Question

I am having an issue with mod rewrite. I am also a total beginner to it. I am using CodeIgniter and trying to rewrite the following:
http://url.dev/news/news_selection?item=59
to look like this:
http://url.dev/news/news_selection/59/
I have followed a tutorial on: https://www.addedbytes.com/articles/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/ (more specifically the : "Patterns and Replacements" section)
The issue is I write my RewriteRule as below and it still does not rewrite the url after going to the page (eg. http://url.dev/news/news_selection?item=59)
RewriteRule ^news/news_selection/([0-9]+)/?$ news_selection?item=$1 [NC,L]
Any advice on where I am going wrong? Thank you.
I am not sure if the routes and controller affect this issue but I added them for reference below.
In my routes for codeIgniter I have
//_News Folder
$route['news/(:any)'] = 'pages/view2/_news/$1';
1: _news is the folder
2: news_selection is the php file
3: pages is the controller
My controller has the following function for view2:
public function view2($sub ='', $page='')
{
if ( ! file_exists(APPPATH.'/views/pages/'.$sub.'/'.$page.'.php'))
{
// Whoops, we don't have a page for that!
show_404();
}
$data['title'] = ucfirst($page); // Capitalize the first letter
$this->load->view('templates/header', $data);
$this->load->view('pages/'.$sub.'/'.$page.'.php', $data);
$this->load->view('templates/footer', $data);
}
The rest of my .htaccess:
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#Removes access to the system folder by users.
#Additionally this will allow you to create a System.php controller,
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^system.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
#When your application folder isn't in the system folder
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^application.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
#Checks to see if the user is attempting to access a valid file,
#such as an image or css document, if this isn't true it sends the
#request to index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
# If we don't have mod_rewrite installed, all 404's
# can be sent to index.php, and everything works as normal.
# Submitted by: ElliotHaughin
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

Answer 1

You just need this to use url as above:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|captcha|css|js|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
You can use this for all controller. This file .htaccess is in application folder.

Answer 2

I figured it out after about 10 hours of trying everything today.
I decided that it may be a routing issue with CI and decided to try passing my variable from the url in the cleaned up format. So...
If I enter: http://url.dev/news/news_selection/59
It will work with the following route:
//_News Folder
$route['news/news_selection/(:num)'] = 'pages/view_test/_news/news_selection/$1';
and controller:
public function view_test($sub='', $page='', $var1='')
{
if ( ! file_exists(APPPATH.'/views/pages/'.$sub.'/'.$page.'.php'))
{
// Whoops, we don't have a page for that!
show_404();
}
$data['item'] = $var1;
$this->load->view('templates/header');
$this->load->view('pages/'.$sub.'/'.$page.'.php', $data);
$this->load->view('templates/footer');
}
By using these I can pass the page number as $var1 and then pass it on to my view via $data. Then I picked up $data['item'] as $item in my news_selection.php page and passed it to my model for processing. Reference to CI Manual for this.
After that the page processes like it normally would have.