rewriting URLs by language

I'm not sure if this falls under content negotiation or rule rewriting or both. What I want to do is find out what language they want using content negotiation and then redirect them to my script sending the language as a variable.

Instead of using a bunch of files called index.html.fr, index.html.en, index.html.de I'll use a script like this so that

index.html.en becomes index.php?lang=en
index.html.fr becomes index.php?lang=fr
index.html.de becomes index.php?lang=de

etc., etc., etc.

I imagine you could use the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE server variable for the rewriting of the rule, but I haven't found enough documentation to tell me how to do that.

An example would be nice.

Thanks
nemo

Passing the language to a php script is a good idea, example:

/* "Virtual" Page */
/articles/xxx/yy.html
(note about yy:
'en' for english
'it' for italiano
)

could be internal redirected to
/* "Physical" page */
/pages/articles/show.php?lang=yy&id=xxx

I put these rules inside my httpd.conf, my web host will let me modify it :-)).

####short example of internal redirection
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/articles/([^/]+)/(en|it).html$ /pages/articles/show.php?lang=$2&id=$1 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
####customize the rules for your needs

([^/]+), can be customized to fit your needs (only numbers, etc)

This is a simple example that could give you some ideas,
depending of what you want to do and the tools that you have.

More infos about rewrite here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

also if you do a search inside this forum you could found many threads about rewrite...they helped me a lot :-)