url_suffix in codeigniter not working properly - codeigniter

Question

I am new to Codeigniter and using Codeigniter 1.7, I created a .htaccess file in root directory with code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /ci/index.php/$1 [L]
to remove index.php from urls, and added
$config['url_suffix'] = ".html";
to config.php file to provide default suffix for all pages. After that I created a controller test.php with this code:
class Test extends Controller{
function test(){
parent::Controller();
}
function index(){
$this->load->view('test');
}
}
and a view also:
<?php
echo anchor(current_url(), 'This Page');
?>
When I navigate to http://localhost/ci/test.html it works fine, but when I click the link auto generated by anchor() function in my view it goes to http://localhost/ci/index.php/test.html
How can I remove /index.php/ from urls generated by anchor() function?
Also when i point to home page
localhost/ci/index.html
it shows me a 404 Page not found error but when I point to
localhost/ci/index.php
it works fine. Why home page is not being converted to index.html instead of index.php?

Answer 1

You have to create a rewrite condition with htaccess.
To remove index.php, add this to the root folder .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*) /index.php/$1 [L]
If your loading Test as your default controller then this will be your base url
localhost/ci/
or
localhost/ci/test/
or
localhost/ci/test/index.html
Make sure to set your config.php to this
$config['index_page'] = ''
You should also be using Codeigniter 2.1 for proper php 5 support.
Also your constructor funciton should be like so if using php 5. Else stick with what you have for php 4.
public function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
}