.htaccess redirect with regex - .htaccess

Question

I would like to set up a redirect via .htaccess as follows:
All pages from https://example.net/xyz/* should be redirected to https://example.net/abc/:
https://example.net/xyz/foo --> https://example.net/abc/
https://example.net/xyz/bar --> https://example.net/abc/
https://example.net/xyz/baz --> https://example.net/abc/
https://example.net/xyz/foo/bar/baz --> https://example.net/abc/
Would it be something like this?
RedirectMatch 301 ^/xyz/ https://example.net/abc/
or
Redirect 301 ^/xyz/.* https://example.net/abc/
and what would be the difference?

Answer 1

Neither of those is correct.
Redirect match should have a capturing group like:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/xyz/(.*) https://example.net/abc/$1
The redirect directive doesn't use regex at all. Its matches are always "starts with". This should do what you want:
Redirect 301 /xyz https://example.net/abc
I would prefer to use the Redirect rather than the RedirectMatch in this case because the regex functionality is not actually needed.
As for whether it would work, you can try testing rules in simulators like https://htaccess.madewithlove.com/ or you can bring up a staging server. Testing ahead of time is a good idea, especially if there are other rules in your .htaccess file. Redirect directives often conflict with RewriteRule directives and cause unexpected behavior if you use both.