Redirecting “.htaccess” with same folder & file name - .htaccess

Question

A while ago I rebuilt a site that was on a CMS. As expected the Google search console regularly comes up with URLs that generate 404 crawling errors which I would promptly redirect to their new equivalents using a 301 on a .htaccess file.
The issue is that I came across the URL of an old page which looked like this:
http://www.example.com/example
The new page is now called http://www.example.com/example.php.
There is, however, a folder called example too so if I add a redirect like this:
Redirect 301 /example http://www.example.com/example.php
everything in that folder also gets redirected, so a URL called http://www.example.com/example/product.php would now show up as http://www.example.com/example.php/product.php.
Is there a way to redirect the old URL successfully without having to rename the folder example?

Answer 1

Please clear your browser cache and then put the following code at main root .htaccess file :
DirectorySlash Off
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+example [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) /$1.php [R=302,L]
The code above will stop directoryslash and make it off so no file without slash goes to be directory as default and then check if example exists in QUERY_STRING and the trick comes here in this line RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f,it will check if adding .php to this string , is that really file in directory or not ? and already we have example.php in root so , it will go to last line to redirect any string that passed the rules above to itself.php and that what you want exactly.
The above code will catch any example in only root directory with example only but if wanna inherit other sub-folders or apply this rule to entire site so , whenever there is string without extension the priority will be for the file , put the following code at your main root .htaccess file :
DirectorySlash Off
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) /$1.php [R=302,L]
After testing this code , if it is Ok , change 302 to 301 to be permanent redirection