Anyways, great job switching it over to PHP, it seems flawless. Keep up the great writing. It’s inspired some of us in the Freenet Project to start writing about design and getting people to standardize their stuff.

Doug – to answer you recursion question from the email you sent me – the condition that breaks the recurring is one that the programmer needs to set up. There is no automagic process for breaking a recursive algorithm. In my example above, it’s the condition

if ( i < max )

If you can’t check something (a value, property, etc) to make sure the recursion never ends, then you shouldn’t use recursion – but a more statically defined loop.

Make a teeny bit more sense now?

We do not know any sure way to explain recursion. Our experience is that people stare at recursive programs for a long time without understanding how they work. Then, one day, they suddenly get it — and they don’t understand why they ever thought it was difficult. Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.

- Accelerated C++, p. 134

Interesting about the R flag for the rules. I’ve always use QSA (Query-string append). I guess the result is similar (I’m no Apache guru, by any means)

I’ll take a swing at explaining recursion (with a super-simple javascript example). Basically, a function that calls itself is a recursive function.

var i = 0;
var max = 6;

increment();
alert( i );

It should be fairly easy to see that recursion is just another looping mechanism. Yes, it can get much more complicated than this, but maybe this little demo will give you jumping off point for understanding recursion. I can come back with something more complicated later if you like.

-Peter

P.S. Being able to use <pre> elements would be nice for code examples ;)

Since the rewrite engine basically uses regular expression matching I guess that is so, since a single dot could stand for any single character. It is just something I have never done, nor given any thought.

Thanks – testing begins!

<a href="<?php
echo preg_replace("#index.html$#","","<$MTArchiveLink$>");
?>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></a>

Anyway, about the array: The redirects only need to carry up to the point when the site switched over, so the array won’t need to grow dynamically. Now that the array is written, it shouldn’t change, unless I discover a copy/paste error, or an old entry title changes.

But good to know PHP has built-in file system functions.

You can loop through the contents of the logs directory, ignoring all but directories within. Each directory name could be loaded into a working array and a master array.

foreach the working array, taking each value and reading that particular directory (logs/$value), and adding each value to a master array of files for redirection.

Recurse through all levels you need, until you get to the files..

Beats writing the array by hand.