rewriting url to hide real page path - .htaccess

Question

I recently with the help of SO solved my htaccess rewriterule issue:
Reuse subdomain in a rewrite rule
The result is that when somebody enters
whatever.example.com/anypage
in the adress bar, the htaccess automatically redirects to
whatever.example.com/somepath/whatever/anypage
What I wish to do is to find a way to just show whatever.example.com/anypage in the adress bar with the content of whatever.example.com/somepath/whatever/anypage displayed.
In the post I mentioned earlier, Jon Lin clearly mentions the following:
redirects always change what's in the browser's URL address bar
However I know some very frequent cases of url rewritting that would show in the adress bar let's say, for instance:
example.com/article-1-15
but actually showing the content of
example.com/somepath/somepage.php?article=1&otherparam=15
How could this apply to my case? I really wish to have a tiny url but it seems I missed something.

Answer 1

You may try something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)$
RewriteRule .* http://whatever.example.com/somepath/whatever/%1 [L]
It will map:
http://whatever.example.com/anypage
To a resource at:
http://whatever.example.com/somepath/whatever/anypage
showing always in the browser's address bar:
http://whatever.example.com/anypage
UPDATED
If whatever is dynamic and is the same in the substitution URI, here is another option:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([^/]+)\.example\.com.*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)$
RewriteRule .* http://%1.example.com/somepath/%1/%2 [L]
This will work as long as both "whatever" in the substitution path are the same. If they are not, the last "whatever" has to be hardcoded, like this:
RewriteRule .* http://%1.example.com/somepath/whatever/%2 [L]
There is no other way as the incoming URL doesn't have it.