OK, that was lame and unclear what I'm really looking for with mod_rewrite, I want to make sure I got it right, sorry.
SO if i have a link in a flat page that looks like
buncharecipes.jsp/title/pistachio
it will pass
buncharecipes.jsp?title=pistachio
but i also want buncharcipes.jsp/type/pie/ingredient/apple
to call buncharecipes.jsp?type=pie&ingedients=apple
without it doing some redirect type thing as far as the user can see.
there.
sorry for the verbosity.
I've tried different approaches on this and am losing the battle - perhaps someone here will have some guidance that could help me to be winning!
the url is normally like
arecipe.jsp?name=Cheese+Pizza&ingredient=Flour&culture=Italian&Type=
I would like that to look in the browser something like arecipe.jsp/name/Cheese+Pizza/ingredient/Flour/Culture/Italian
and then in the example type is empy i would want the url rewrite to be empty, so it wouldn't add the name,ingredient, culture if it didn't have anything assigned in the argument. or the other way around.
guess what i really mean is that my desire is to provide a link that looks like the second example but delivers the functionality i now get from the first. also, i want this to only work on some file names and not others. ugh.
so, if anyone looks at this and says 'oh, no brainer' i would be so grateful if you could show me the correct way to approach it.
Unsolved 
