title: .htaccess RewriteRule to preserve GET URL parameters
body: <p>I'm having issues keeping the parameters of the URL working after an <code>.htaccess</code> URL rewrite.</p>
  <p>My <code>.htaccess</code> rewrite is as follows:</p>
  <pre><code> RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2,2})/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ index.php?lang=$1&amp;page=$2
  </code></pre>
  <p>Which means:</p>
  <p><code>example.com/index.php?lang=en&amp;page=product</code> displays as <code>example.com/en/product</code></p>
  <p>For some reason, when I add a <code>?model=AB123&amp;color=something</code> at the end of my URLs I am not able to retrieve those parameters in PHP using <code>$_GET['model']</code> and <code>$_GET['color']</code> even though they are present in the displayed URL.</p>
  <p>Why aren't the variables passed along?</p>