nginx forward wildcard urls

Can someone help me with how to set up an nginx forward that does the following:

This is what I have so far. I was going to adapt it but to be honest I can't get off the ground

location ~* ^/pdf/(.*)$ {
      rewrite ^/pdf/(\d+)*$ /pdf.php;
 }

    

I would like it to :

• match any urls that are the in the format
  • https://example.com/pdf/My-Old-Man
  • or https://example.com/pdf/My-Old-Man/
  • https://example.com/pdf/Big-Hamster
  • or https://example.com/pdf/Big-Hamster/ and forward them to pdf.php
• not match calls to pdf.php directly
• forward the part /My-Old-Man such that I can read it in my php as part of the '$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']' later on (to query a db)
• disallow anything https://example.com/pdf/My-Old-Man/bobchips

I know this is asking a lot, but I think this sort of thing is really useful and I can't see anyone doing it on the internet.

Here is one of the possible solutions:

location ^~ /pdf/ {
    location ~ ^/pdf/(?<name>[^/]+)/?$ {
        rewrite ^ /pdf.php?book=$name;
    }
    return 403;
}
location = /pdf.php {
    internal;
    # your php handler here, e.g.:
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$uri;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/path/to/php.sock;
}

Requested name should be available as a book query argument inside your PHP script.