Ok,
this is very frustrating. I thought what I was doing would be quite common and easy, but I'm having a lot of trouble, and nothing I've tried has even remotely worked. So I'm still at square one.
I want to take a URL like:
http://www.domain.com/<IDENTIFIER>/path/to/some/file.php?var1=5&var2=blah
and WITHOUT REDIRECTING, have the server process:
http://www.domain.com/path/to/some/file.php?ID=<IDENTIFIER>&var1=5&var2=blah
(or /DocumentRoot/path/to/some/file.php?ID=<IDENTIFIER>&var1=5&var2=blah)
But, the server is looking for a file <IDENTIFIER> in the DocumentRoot and returning a 404. Of course <IDENTIFIER> will never exist, but path/to/some/file.php will always exist.
How can I do this?