Removing index.php from website URLs
Try this:
RewriteRule ^index\.php/(.*) $1 [NS,NC,L,R=301]What you're not processing is that all requests are subject to rewriting, and when you do a rewrite it generate a subrequest -- which is also subject to rewriting. So you wind up rewriting /articles to /index.php/articles, then in the subrequest that that issue, you rewrite /index.php/articles to /articles and generate a new request for the 301 redirect, on and on. Adding the NS flag will make this rule not operate on subrequests, which I think should fix your problem, unless you're also doing a 301 on the /articles -> /index.php/articles rewrite (but that would be madness).