title: Network Solutions hosting URL looks weird for Apache server
body: <p>I was trying to prettify URLs for dynamically generated pages on my website, so that when a user visited the virtual URL <code>topicview/interesting-user-friendly-text</code> he would really be seeing, under the hood, <code>topicview.php?topicid=123</code></p>
  
  <p>I added the necessary code to my .htaccess file to replace the <code>topicview/interesting-text</code> part of the URL with <code>topicview.php?topicname=interesting-test</code>, but the Regex kept misfiring. </p>
  
  <p>So, I changed the Regex to return the entire URL so I could see why it wasn't working with this code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#Allow for topicview/topic-name URLs
  RewriteRule (.+)$ topicview.php?topicname=$1 [L]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I then visited <code>topicview/user-friendly-text</code>. I'm not sure if this is unique to Network Solutions hosting, however, when I examined the <code>topicname</code> GET paramter, I got this string in return:</p>
  
  <p><code>data/1/2/323/232/823238/user/999999/htdocs/topicview.php</code></p>
  
  <p>This URL was not displayed in the <code>topicname</code> GET parameter, just a regular file, like <code>index.php</code> or <code>topicview.php</code>, if I just visit the URL <code>index.php</code> or <code>topicview.php</code></p>
  
  <p>Why is the URL internally represented like this to the Apache server, and how can I rewrite my <code>mod_rewrite</code> code to get a more user friendly virtual URL for the <code>topicview.php?topicid=1</code> pages?</p>
  
  <p>thanks</p>