I have a requirement to make the following paths work.
Depending on what the url consists of, they are mapped to go to different java classes.
/books/
/books/science/
/books/science/fiction/
/books/science/fiction/kids/
So, I have given the rewrite rules in my configuration file as:
^/books$
^/books/(.*)$
^/books/(.*)/(.*)$
^/books/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$
but the moment I give a url something like this
http://localhost/books/science/fiction/kids/12345
instead of getting captured by the fourth rewrite rule, it is captured by the second one which is not what I want.
Can someone please tell me how to achieve this? Thanks in advance
^/books$ /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ABCController?resultsFor=allCategories [PT,QSA]
^/books/(.*)$ /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/XYZController?make=$1&resultsFor=category [PT,QSA]
^/books/(.*)/(.*)$ /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ABCDController?format=$1-$2&resultsFor=subCategory [PT,QSA]
^/books/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ASDFController?resultsFor=product [PT,QSA]
instead of getting captured by the fourth rewrite rule, it is captured by the second one
That’s because the dot matches any character, so slashes as well.
Replacing it by a character class allowing anything but a slash (and demanding at least one character out of that class, so + instead of *) should fix that: ([^/]+)
Another way would be to reverse the order of your rules … You should always try and write them in order from most to least specific anyway.
Related
I want to make URL friendly with multiple conditions.
I got this: www.example.com/?lang=en&page=test&model=mymodel
I want to have: www.example.com/en/test/mymodel
But I got also this (with other parameters):
www.example.com/?lang=en&otherpage=othertest&othermodel=myothermodel
Must be:
www.example.com/en/othertest/myothermodel
How can I do this for my entire website?
If you're going to use friendly URLs that look like this:
www.example.com/<language>/<value1>/<value2>
then Apache won't be able to distinguish between the first and the second "non-friendly" URLs that you mentioned:
www.example.com/?lang=en&page=test&model=mymodel
www.example.com/?lang=en&otherpage=othertest&othermodel=myothermodel
This is because the parameter names (page and model in the 1st, otherpage and othermodel in the 2nd URL) are not present, and can't be guessed, from the friendly URL.
A possible workaround depends on how many different scenarios you have, that is, how many different parameters you want to handle.
E.g. if you only have a few scenarios, you can add a part to the friendly URL pattern telling Apache which parameter names to use, like so:
www.example.com/<language>/<parameter_set>/<value1>/<value2>
then, tell Apache to use the first parameter set if <parameter_set> equals e.g. 1, the second set if it equals 2 and so on.
A sample rewrite rule set could be:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([\w]+)/1/([\w]+)/([\w]+)$ ./?lang=$1&page=$2&model=$3
RewriteRule ^([\w]+)/2/([\w]+)/([\w]+)$ ./?lang=$1&otherpage=$2&othermodel=$3
Please note that 1 and 2 are completely arbitrary (they could be any other string).
Naturally, the official docs are there to help.
I don't know how to rewrite URLs of this type:
mywebsite/param1-val1-param2-val2-param3-val3-param4-val4.html
that's really simple to do BUT my problem is that my parameters are variables like:
mywebsite/param1-val1-param3-val3-param4-val4.html
or
mywebsite/param3-val3-param4-val4.html
so, the number of parameters is not always the same. It can sometimes be just one, sometimes it can be 10 or more. It redirects to a search script which will grab the parameters through GET querystring.
What I want to do is to not write (on htaccess) a line for every link. The links are pretty simple in that form separated by a -(hyphen) sign.
Rather than rely on complex rewrite rules, I would suggest a simple rewrite rule and then modifying the code of your web application to do the hard part. Supporting this kind of variable parameters is not something that a rewrite rule is going to be very good at on its own.
I would use the following rewrite rule that intercepts any url that contains a hyphen separator and ends in .html
RewriteRule ^(.+[\-].+)\.html$ /query.html?params=$1
Then in your web application can get the parameters from the CGI parameter called params . They look like this now param1-val1-param3-val3-param4-val4. Your code should then split on the hyphens, and then put the parameters into a map. Most web frameworks support some way of adding to or overriding the request parameters. If so, you can do this without doing invasive modifications to the rest of your code.
I've given myself a headache trying to figure out if this can be done. I have a forum that was recently migrated, leaving thousands of broken dynamic links.
A typical URL looks like this:
http://domain.com/Forum_Name/b10001/25/
('b10001' refers to the forum ID number and the last number refers to the page number.)
The new URL is formatted like this:
http://domain.com/forums/Forum_Name.10001/
(No page number. Also, notice the 'b' is no longer in front of the ID number.)
Is there a rewrite rule that can achieve this?
I'm not a rewriter, but following what I've read here, something like this should work:
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/b([0-9])+(/[0-9]+)?/?.*$ forums/$1.$2/ [NC,L]
^([A-Za-z0-9-]+) says "begins with an alphanumeric string", then there's the /b constant, followed by [0-9]+ (one or more digits), and then an optional / with one or more digit (the page number, (/[0-9]+)?), and lastly, it ends with an optional slash (/?$).
If the URL matches that pattern, then it's rewritten to forums/$1\.$2/. \. escapes the dot (it's a wildcard), $1 is the first match of the pattern (that first alphanumeric string which is the forum name), and $2 is the second match, namely, the number after the b.
Finally, NC means pattern is case-insensitive, and L is "last" - so you don't process any other rule. I think that is most up to you, just read the linked article and pick the flags you need :)
Edit: corrected pattern checking with http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/
I think what you're looking for is
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/b([0-9]+)/.*$ forums/$1/$2/
Make sure the contents of the [] parts match the format you're using for forum names and ids.
For parameters, you probably want R=301 to force a permanent redirect.
A big problem is that I am not a programmer….! So I need to solve this with means within my own competence… I would be very happy for help!
I have an issue with a lot of duplicated URLs in the Google index and there are strong signs that it is causing SEO problems.
I don’t have duplicate links on the site itself, but as it once was set-up, for certain pages the system allows all sorts of variations in the URL. As long as is it has a specific article-id, the same content will be presented under an infinite number of URLs.
I guess the duplicates in Google's index has been growing over long time and is due to links gone wrong from other sites that links to mine. The problem is that the system have accepted the variations.
Here are examples of variations that exists in the Google index:
site.com/a/Cow_Cat/id/5272
site.com/a/cow_cat/id/5272
site.com/a/cow…cat/id/5272
site.com/a/cowcat/id/5272
site.com/a/bird/id/5272
The first URL with mixed case is the one used site-wide and for now I have to live with it, it would take too long time to make a change to all lower case. I cannot make a manual effort via htaccess as it is a total of 300.000 articles. I believe there are 10 ‘s of thousands that have one or more duplicates.
My question is this:
Is it possible to create rules for canonical URLs in htaccess in order to make the above URLs to be handled as one as well as for the rest of the 300.000?
I e, is there a way to say that all URLs having
/a/*/id/uniqueid
should be seen as one = based only on the unique ID and not give any regard to the text expressed with the “*”?
My hope is that it would be possible to say that a certain pattern like above should only be differentiated by the last unique segment.
If it is not possible in htaccess, how would it be done with link rel="canonical" on each page, can the code include wildcards?
I should add that the majority of the duplicates are caused by incoming links being lower case where the site itself is using a mix. Would it be OK to assign a canonical URL only with lower case although the site itself is basically always using a mix of lower/upper case?
If this is possible, I would be very happy to be helped with how to do it!!!!
Jonas
Hi Michael! I am not an expert but this is how I think it could be done:
1) My problem is that the URLs have mixed cases and I cannot change that now.
2) If it is OK for the searchengines, it would be fine for me to make the canonical URL identical to the actual URLs with the difference that it was all lower case, that would solve approx 90% of the duplicates. I e this would be the used URL: site.com/a/Cow_Cat/id/5272 and this would be the canonical: site.com/a/cow_cat/id/5272. As I understand, that would be good SEO...or...?
My idea was NOT to change the address browser address bar (i e using 301 redirect) but rather just telling the search engines which URLs that are duplicates, as I understand, that can be done by defining a canonical URL either in htaccess (as a pattern - I hope) or as a tag on each page.
3) IF, it would be possible to find a wildcard solution...I am not sure if this is possible at all, but that would mean it was possible to NOT assign a specific canonical URL but rather a "group pattern", i e "Please search engine, see all URLs with this patter - having the unique identifier in the end - as if they are one and the same URL, you SE, decide which one you prefer": /a/*/id/uniqueid
Would that work? It will only work in htaccess if canonical URLs can be defined as a group where the group is defined as a pattern with a defined part as the unique id.
Is it possible when adding a tag for each page to say that "all URLs containing this unique id should be treated the same"? If that would work it would look something similar to this
link rel="canonical" /a/*/id/5272
I dont know if this syntax with wildcard exist but it would be nice : )
My advice would be to use 301 redirects, with URL rewriting. Ask your webmaster to place this in your apache config or virtual host config:
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
Then inside your .htaccess file you can use the map ${lc:$1} to convert matches to lower case. Here, the $1 part is a match (backreference from brackets in a regex in the RewriteRule) and the ${lc: } part is just how you apply the lc (lowercase) function set up earlier. Here is an example of what you might want in your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] #this matches a url with any uppercase characters
RewriteRule (.*) /${lc:$1} [L,R=301] #this makes it lowercase
As for matching the IDs, presuming your examples mean "always end with the ID" you could use a regex like:
^(.+/)(\d+))$
The first match (brackets) gets everything up to and including the forward slash before the ID, and the second part grabs the ID. We can then use it to point to a single, specific URL (like canonical, but with a 301).
If you do just want to use canonical tags, then you'll have to say what you're using code wise, but an example I use (so as not add tags to hundreds of individual pages, for instance) in PHP would be:
if ($_SERVER["REDIRECT_URL"] != "") {
$canonicalUrl = $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] . $_SERVER["REDIRECT_URL"];
} else if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] != "") {
$canonicalUrl = $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] . preg_replace('/^([^?]+)\?.*$/', "$1", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
Here, the redirect URL is used if it's available, and if not the request uri is used. This code strips off the query string (this bold bit in http://www.mysite.com/a/blah/12345/?something=true). Of course you can add to this code to specify a custom path, not just taking off the query string, by playing with the regex.
I have a number of pages in my site, as one would expect.
For example:
index.php
submit.php
view.php?id=blah
I want these rewritten like
index/
submit/
view/blah
Whats the best way of doing this?
The ways of handling it through .htaccess Rewrite can generate a bit of a headache. It seems like a basic answer, but unless you're up on your regular expressions, you're going to be lost.
There's a few ways of handling it, however. I'm assuming that you only have index.php, submit.php, and view.php with an id associated.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(index|submit|view)/(\d+)$ /$1.php?id=$2
RewriteRule ^(index|submit|view)/(\d+)$ /$1.php
Here's how it works: You tell .htaccess to turn on the Rewrite Engine. Step 2, you give the site the parameter that tells it how it's done. The parameter in this case reads: At the beginning of the url, after the domain name, check for index, submit, or view. If those exists, it'll look for the id. If both those exists, it will return the value into PHP as /(index, submit, or view)?id=$id.
The second one is in case the ID isn't viable.
This is a simple way of handling it. A more complex way of handling it would be...
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/?(\d+)?$ /$1.php?id=$2
This will load whatever is written in regular alphabetical characters of upper and lower case letters only, use that as the filename, then detects if id is even necessary--it will load without.
You should be sure to include some safeguards on your $_GET lines to return errors if the names are erroneous or doesn't return anything of worth.
You should play around with it, research Regular Expressions over a pot of coffee and something alcoholic (I believe that regexp is the #1 cause of alcoholism in modern programmers, but I could be wrong ;-P ...) til you find a scheme that fits comfortably into your system.
As a side-note, you can have as many RewriteRules as you need, but they always get processed from the top one first. I realize this sounds like common sense, but it's important to know when debugging.