I'm setting up Apache rewrite rules to tidy up my CodeIgniter URLs.
This question (and lots of forum posts etc that I've found around the place) document the use of the following rule (or something very similar):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|phpinfo\.php|images|robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml\.gz|sitemap\.xml|assets)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
I know the $1 after the RewriteRule refers to the captured string from (.*), but what does the first $1 (straight after the RewriteCond) represent? A lot of examples I've seen use something like %{REQUEST_URI} as the first argument for RewriteCond.