nginx clean url with seo friendly file names

I wish to implement the following which is working perfectly under Apache. This is being done for better SEO of the URLs.

Example URLS:

http://www.astrogyan.com/enter/indian_a … ction.html">http://www.astrogyan.com/enter/indianastrologyhoroscopechartprediction.html

http://www.astrogyan.com/know_your_gems … eelam.html">http://www.astrogyan.com/knowyourgemstone/gID-7/saniplanetsaturngemstonebluesapphireneelam.html

What I am exactly looking forward to is a location regex to catch all extension-less php scripts in the ROOT FOLDER ONLY for processing by php-fptm.

In all the above URLs "enter", "knowyourgemstone" are all PHP scripts and what follows them are dummy file names generated by PHP for SEO. Actually "indianastrologyhoroscopechartprediction.html" file name does not exist. In Apache, I use the following which intercepts "enter / knowyourgemstone" etc and never bothers about the rest of the file name:

DefaultType application/x-httpd-php

In the last of the above URL, "gID-7" is used to pass a variable to the script to show appropriate content. While this URL is showing DYNAMIC content, the URL is so crafted that is looks like a STATIC URL which can be indexed by search engines easily. This variable parsing is done in PHP already and has nothing to do with Nginx. I beleive this part is already referred as pretty url / clean url.

I need to know how best can this be implemented under NGINX? I need the regex to process all scripts (extension less files) in ROOT FOLDER and ignore what follows after such script names. If such a file does not exist, then consider to check the rest of the URL hoping it to be a valid directory followed by a file name. This directory portion is optional and not essential to my present needs.

I have a VPS running ubuntu where I have installed nginx with php-fpm and for normal URL's like index.htm / index.php the setup is working fine. I am not a pro in regex writing hence I am stuck up at this juncture. I searched online under many nginx blogs / forum but could not find the right solution.

I am using the latest development version of Nginx v1.1.17 with php v5.3.6.13. I have also compiled additional modules like more header, cache purge, memcache etc.

Any help on this will be most appreciated. Thanks in advance…

Regards

Ganesh Lohia