Getting 404 Error When Rewriting URLs with .htacces - .htaccess

Question

I am trying to rewrite my URLs to have clean URLs. For example I want the following URL rewritten like so:
www.domain.com/events/events.php
www.domain.com/events/
It is rewritting the URL correctly but the rewritten URL is giving a 404 error. What am I doing wrong?
I am using the following rule:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST)\ /(.*)/(.*)\.php\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^ http://www.domain.com/%3/? [R=301,L]

Answer 1

Once you've got the rules to externally redirect the browser, you then need to add rules to internally rewrite to the actual files. So you need to add:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ /$1/$1.php [L]
Now, this rule takes a URI that looks like /(something)/ to /(something)/(something).php. So:
/foo/ to /foo/foo.php
/example/ to /example/example.php
etc.
There's no other info you're providing in the rewritten URI that tells you what the php filename is, so if you have something like this:
/foo/bar.php
there's no way to extract the "bar" out of /foo/. You'd need to additionally encode that in the clean url:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST)\ /(.*)/(.*)\.php\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^ http://www.domain.com/%2/%3/? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /$1/$2.php [L]