[.htaccess] rewrite a folder name using .htaccess

I am wondering wether it's possible to use .htaccess to rewrite a folder name. What I mean is this.

Lets say I have a url like:

www.site.com/folder1/page.php

Now I want to rewrite the url to (for example)

www.site.com/apple/page.php

The folder1 is an existing folder on my webspace.

important: the "apple" is not a folder rather just a name!

Ok here is a step by step plan:

1. User types www.site.com/folder1/login.php
2. The url should rewrite and not redirect the url to www.site.com/apple/login.php

This means that apple is just a name and not a directory. All the code should just come from folder1. Acutally apple should just be an alias for folder1. I can't just rename folder1 to Apple. Therefor I would just rewrite folder1 to apple.

try:

RewriteRule ^/apple(.*)?$ /folder1$1 [NC]

Where the folder you want to appear in the url is in the first part of the statement - this is what it will match against and the second part 'rewrites' it to your existing folder. the [NC] flag means that it will ignore case differences eg Apple/ will still forward.

See here for a tutorial: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting/

There is also a nice test utility for windows you can download from here: http://www.helicontech.com/download/rxtest.zip Just to note for the tester you need to leave out the domain name - so the test would be against /folder1/login.php

to redirect from /folder1 to /apple try this:

RewriteRule ^/folder1(.*)?$ /apple$1 [R]

to redirect and then rewrite just combine the above in the htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^/folder1(.*)?$ /apple$1 [R]
RewriteRule ^/apple(.*)?$ /folder1$1 [NC]