How to change a url to a user friendly one in php

I have a little php knowledge but am completely self-taught so I decided I want to start a side project as I enjoy challenging myself. I use WordPress daily so I thought I would try to make my own small blog for a learning project but not sure how to approach this URL issue.

I have articles in my database and pulling the article via the url what I am hoping to do is to use a friendly URL.

this is my URL http://localhost/news/index.php?article_slug=test-example
what I'm trying to achieve is http://localhost/news/test-example

I have been searching other posts on here like this one my .htaccess file looks like this.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} 200
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule ^news/(\d+)$ /news/?article_slug=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} article_slug=(\d+)
RewriteRule ^news$ /news/%1 [R,L]

When I go to the desired URL I get a 404 not found.

I'm am using xamp, not sure if this is relevant to my problem, but thought I would mention it.

Your current capturing pattern (\d+) matches only numerical strings ("d" for "digit").

You probably want to change it into something like (.+) instead. Or maybe ([\w\d-]+) ...

There are good explanations and valuable tools available to work into the field of "regular expressions". It is well worth investing into that, such expressions are used throughout computer science and the technology behind that is more or less independent from a specific programming language.