My .htaccess file looks like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^articles/(\d+)*$ ./articles.php?id=$1
So, if the URL foo.com/articles/123 is requested, control is transferred to articles.php?id=123.
However, if the requested URL is:
foo.com/articles/123/
or
foo.com/articles/123/whatever
I get a "404 Not Found" response.
I would like to call articles.php?id=123 in all these cases. So, if the URL starts with foo.com/articles/[digits]... no matter what other characters follow the digits, I would like to execute articles.php?id=[digits]. (The rest of the URL is discarded.)
How do I have to change the regular expression in order to achieve this?
Just don't look for the end:
RewriteRule ^articles/(\d+) ./articles.php?id=$1
You do need to allow the trailing / with:
RewriteRule ^articles/(\d+)/?$
The \d+ will only match decimals. And the $ would disallow matches beyond the end.
If you also need trailing identifiers, then you need to allow them too. Then it might be best to make the match unspecific:
RewriteRule ^articles/(.+)$
Here .+ matches virtually anything.
But if you want to keep the numeric id separate then combine those two options:
RewriteRule ^articles/(\d+)(/.*)?$ ./articles.php?id=$1