htaccess issue with seo friendly urls - GoDaddy

Question

Here's what I've written in my htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ category.php?location=$1

So the idea is to change mysite.com/category.php?location=londonto mysite.com/category/london.

Initially I though it may be an issue with the ability to mod rewrite being switched on on GoDaddy's end, so I contacted GoDaddy to see if it that was the case and their response was that: "Mod_rewrite is an Apache Web server module installed on all of our Linux servers by default; it does not have to be installed or enabled. Our Linux hosting accounts support most mod_rewrite functions. Because enabling mod_rewrite is handled at a global level, you do not need to enable it in your httpd.conf file. You only need to add the desired code to the body of your .htaccess file."

And they bascially implied that the error is not with them and with my code. I'm not very experienced with mod rewrites and it seemed to work fine when I wrote it like this on other servers. Is there something special you have to write with godaddy? Am I missing something?

Answer 1

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /

  RewriteRule ^category/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ category.php?location=$1 [L]
</IfModule>

add this if statement as default