RewriteCond to exclude a directory and it's sub-directories

I've been trying to get a wikipedia style language thing to work. So that the url will be en.example.com for English, fr.example.com for French, etc... This is working fine however I would like the admin area to always default to base language, i.e. not set the LANGUAGE environment variable. I've tried adding RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^admin [NC] but it seems to have no effect.

My mod_rewrite code is as follows:

# Handle languages 
# Picks up the language code from the browser accept-language parameter
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^([a-z]{2}).*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^[a-z]{2}\.[a-z]{2,}\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301] 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^admin [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z]{2})\.[a-z]{2,}\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [ENV=LANGUAGE:%1,QSA]

# Redirecting all requests to one script
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
RewriteRule ^([\+a-zA-Z0-9,%\(\)\_\ -/]+)$ /index.php [NC,L,QSA]

Thanks for any help, I'm sure it's 开发者_如何转开发something really stupid that is wrong, as usual.

Your problem is that REQUEST_URI doesn't start with admin, its going to have a slash in front... it might start with /admin if you have no rewrite base... so you can change it to !^/admin or just !admin or !admin/ if all your code is in foo.com/admin/*

REQUEST_URI is going to be the entire GET like "/foo/bar.html"