[SOLVED] .htaccess Pretty URLs - PHP $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] being overwritten without $_SERVER['REDIRECT_REQUEST

.htaccess Pretty URLs - PHP $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] being overwritten without $_SERVER['REDIRECT_REQUEST_URI'] avalible

.htaccess

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^cars/(.*).html$ /control.php  [P,L]
RewriteRule ^trucks/(.*).html$ /control.php  [P,L]

/control.php

<pre>
<?php
    echo "Path Requested: " . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "\n\n";
    print_r($_SERVER);
?>
</pre>

Test URL (real hostname replaced with "example.com")

http://example.com/trucks/valugatah.html

Result

Path Requested: /control.php

Array
(
    [CONTEXT_DOCUMENT_ROOT] => /home/fubelboobin/public_html
    [CONTEXT_PREFIX] => 
    [DOCUMENT_ROOT] => /home/fubelboobin/public_html
    [GATEWAY_INTERFACE] => CGI/1.1
    [HTTP_ACCEPT] => text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING] => gzip, deflate
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-US,en;q=0.8,gl;q=0.6
    [HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL] => max-age=0
    [HTTP_CONNECTION] => close
    [HTTP_HOST] => fubelboobin.com
    [HTTP_UPGRADE_INSECURE_REQUESTS] => 1
    [HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36
    [HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR] => 23.241.124.74
    [HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST] => fubelboobin.com
    [HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER] => fubelboobin.com
    [PATH] => /bin:/usr/bin
    [QUERY_STRING] => 
    [REDIRECT_STATUS] => 200
    [REMOTE_ADDR] => 166.62.119.108
    [REMOTE_PORT] => 47854
    [REQUEST_METHOD] => GET
    [REQUEST_SCHEME] => http
    [REQUEST_URI] => /control.php
    [SCRIPT_FILENAME] => /home/fubelboobin/public_html/control.php
    [SCRIPT_NAME] => /control.php
    [SERVER_ADDR] => 166.62.119.108
    [SERVER_ADMIN] => webmaster@fubelboobin.com
    [SERVER_NAME] => fubelboobin.com
    [SERVER_PORT] => 80
    [SERVER_PROTOCOL] => HTTP/1.1
    [SERVER_SIGNATURE] => 
    [SERVER_SOFTWARE] => Apache
    [UNIQUE_ID] => WfUhgaY@d2wAACMqjNMAAAAF
    [PHP_SELF] => /control.php
    [REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT] => 1509237121.06
    [REQUEST_TIME] => 1509237121
    [argv] => Array
        (
        )

    [argc] => 0
)

Note that the url visible inside the browser address bar is (as expected and desired):

http://example.com/trucks/valugatah.html

So what's the problem?

I am expecting the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] to be the same as what I see in the address bar, which is the original url of /trucks/valugatah.html however, as you can see from my posted Result $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] is returning /control.php

This shouldn't be a problem, because according to the docs, if $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] gets overwritten, then I should have access to a new var (automatically created) named $_SERVER['REDIRECT_REQUEST_URI'] that preserves the original $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] but as you can see from my Result, $_SERVER['REDIRECT_REQUEST_URI'] never gets created.

I've read everything I could find over the last 2 days, and I've got nothing...

Solution

Removing the "P" flags from inside the .htaccess file solved it. Here's the working code:

.htaccess

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^cars/(.*).html$ /control.php  [L]
RewriteRule ^trucks/(.*).html$ /control.php  [L]