mod_rewrite .htaccess with %20 translate to - - .htaccess

I have been reading about .htaccess files for a couple of hours now and I think I'm starting to get the idea but I still need some help. I found various answers around SO but still unsure how to do this.
As far as I understand you write a rule for each page extension you want to 'prettify', so if you have something.php , anotherpage.php, thispage.php etc and they are expecting(will receive??) arguments, each needs its own rule. Is this correct?
The site I want to change has urls like this,
maindomain.com/sue.php?r=word1%20word2
and at least one page with two arguments
maindomain.com/kevin.php?r=place%20name&c=person%20name
So what I would like to make is
maindomain.com/sue/word1-word2/
maindomain.com/kevin/place-name/person-name/
Keeping this .php page and making it look like the directory. Most of the tutorials I have read deal with how to remove the .php page to which the argument is passed. But I want to keep it.
the problem I am forseeing is that all of the .php?r=parts of the url are the same ie sue.php?r=, kevin.php?r= and the .htaccess decides which URL to change based on the filename and then omits it. If I want to keep the file name will I have to change the ?r=
so that it is individual? I hope this make sense. So far I have this, but I'm sure it won't work.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$1.php?r=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$1.php?r=$1&c=$1
And I think I have to add ([^-]*) this in some part or some way so that it detects the %20 part of the URL, but then how do I convert it to -. Also, how are my $_GET functions going to work??
I hope my question makes sense

You're missing a space somewhere in those rules, but I think you've got the right idea in making 2 separate rules. The harder problem is converting all the - to spaces. Let's start with the conversion to GET variables:
# check that the "sue.php" actually exists:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([^/]+)/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.php -f
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /$1.php?r=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.php -f
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /$1.php?r=$2&c=$3 [L,QSA]
Those will take a URI that looks like /sue/blah/ and:
Extract the sue part
Check that /document_root/sue.php actually exists
rewrite /sue/blah/ to /sue.php?r=blah
Same thing applies to 2 word URI's
Something like /kevin/foo/bar/:
Extract the kevin part
Check that /document_root/kevin.php actually exists
3 rewrite /kevin/foo/bar/ to /kevin.php?r=foo&c=bar
Now, to get rid of the "-" and change them to spaces:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)(c|r)=([^&]+)-(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1?%1%2=%3\ %4 [L]
This looks a little messy but the condition matches the query string, looks for a c= or r= in the query string, matches against a - in the value of a c= or r=, then rewrites the query string to replace the - with a (note that the space gets encoded as a %20). This will remove all the - instances in the values of the GET parameters c and r and replace them with a space.

Related

.htacces rewrite, remove inner part of url

I know there are lots of questions about this topic and i tried a lot of answers, now i found onw working, but the flexibility is missing
i got a folder strucure like
profile/user/username
now i want the the url to be shortened to
/username
the working version i got is this one:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/profile/user/specialuser [NC]
RewriteRule ^specialuser/(.*)$ /profile/user/specialuser/$1 [L]
so using exactly this url, /profile/user/specialuser is transformed to /specialuser, but how can i keep it flexible, that [specialuser] is a placeholder for all the upcoming usernames?
The answer is pretty much there already. You use another capture group, and another placeholder in the rewritten string that is replaced by that capture group. The condition seems useless to me, so I removed it.
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/(.*)$ /profile/user/$1/$2 [L]
[^/] matches a character that is not the / character. It is to make sure it matches only the first part of the url.

.htaccess not working as expected in sub-folder

I have this rewrite rule placed in /dashboard/.htaccess [dashboard is actually a folder]:
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ index.php?mode=$1 [L]
My structure is index.php?mode=support, even though, $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] outputs this:
mode=index.php
Example: site.com/dashboard/index.php?mode=support should be site.com/dashboard/support
So , how can I make it parse the param value, and not the file itself.
Managed to solve it while doing more research on regular expressions.
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)$ index.php?mode=$1 [L,QSA]
Thi solved my problem, preferred plus instead asterisk because it tells the engine to repeat it zero or more times. (when i'm on index.php , query string is empty as needed)
Your rule is matching anything that starts with not a slash and doesnt contain a slash anywhere when your actual path is
/dashboard/support
to get the folder you actually want you need a base on there like this
RewriteBase /dashboard/
If that is placed above the rule, Then your redirect should be ok

Mod_Rewrite to /subdirectory and /subdirectory/query

I'm having a difficult time getting into using mod_rewrite. I've been at this for about an hour googling stuff but nothing quite seems to work. What I want to do is change
example.com/species.php into example.com/species
and also
example.com/species.php?name=frog into example.com/species/frog.
Using
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^species/(.*)$ /species.php?name=$1
I can get example.com/species.php?name=frog to display as example.com/species/frog, and with
RewriteRule ^species/ /species.php
I can get example.com/species.php to display as example.com/species/, but I can't get both of them to work at the same time.
Also, example.com/species with no trailing slash always comes up as a 404.
I've considered just making a /species/ directory to catch any problems but I'd rather just have a few rules for one species.php file. Any help would gladly be appreciated!
Edit (because I can't answer my own question for 8 more hours):
I seem to have fixed both of my problems. I changed my .htaccess to:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^species/(.*)$ /species.php?name=$1
RewriteRule ^species/?$ /species.php
The second RewriteRule successfully redirects example.com/species to example.com/species.php while leaving the other RewriteRule working at the same time.
However, if I typed in example.com/species/ with a trailing slash, it was being read as example.com/species.php?name= and would throw an error because no name was submitted, so I just added
if(isset($_GET['name']) && empty($_GET['name'])) {header('location: http://example.com/species');}
so that if I used example.com/species/ it would redirect to /species and work as desired.
If you change the * (match zero or more) to a + (match one or more) in your first RewriteRule then you should stop seeing species.php?name= if a trailing slash is used.
This is because the + will require that something appears after the slash, otherwise the rule will not match. Then your second RewriteRule will match because it ends with an optional slash, but will not add the name= query string to the target URL.
You may also want to add the [L] flag (last) after the first rule, because you don't need the second rule to execute if the first rule matches. (Note that this will not stop the RewriteCond and RewriteRule tests being run on the resulting redirect URL, which will have to go through the .htaccess file just like any other request.)
See the Reference Documentation for mod_rewrite in Apache 2.4 (or see the docs for the version of Apache you're actually using).

URL Beautification using .htaccess

in search of a more userfriendly URL, how do i achieve both of the following, elegantly using only .htaccess?
/de/somepage
going to /somepage?ln=de
/zh-CN/somepage#7
going to /somepage?ln=zh-CN#7
summary:
/[language]/[pagefilenameWithoutExtension][optional anchor#][a number from 0-9]
should load (without changing url)
/[pagefilenameWithoutExtension]?ln=[language][optional anchor#][a number from 0-9]
UPDATE, after provided solution:
1. exception /zh-CN/somepage should be reachable as /cn/somepage
2. php generated thumbnails now dont load anymore like:
img src="imgcpu?src=someimage.jpg&w=25&h=25&c=f&f=bw"
RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z](-[A-Z][A-Z])?)/(.*) /$3?ln=$1 [L]
You don't need to do anything for fragments (eg: #7). They aren't sent to the server. They're handled entirely by the browser.
Update:
If you really want to treat zh-CN as a special case, you could do something like:
RewriteRule ^zh-CN/(.*) /$1?ln=zh-CN [L]
RewriteRule ^cn/(.*) /$1?ln=zh-CN [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/(.*) /$2?ln=$1 [L]
I would suggest the following -
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/([a-zA-Z]+) /$2?ln=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/([a-zA-Z]+#([0-9])+) /$2?ln=$1$3
The first rule takes care of URLs like /de/somepage. The language should be of exactly two characters
length and must contain only a to z characters.
The second rule takes care of URLs like /uk/somepage#7.

Problem with .htaccess and RewriteRule

I have url's like games/xbox/2
2 being the page number I need the url rewritten. This is what I'm using:
RewriteRule games/(.*?)/$ games/consoles.php?console=$1
RewriteRule games/(.+?)/(.+?)/$ games/consoles.php?console=$1&page=$2
The first rule works fine but the second is returning consoles.php as $1 instead of xbox
RewriteRule games/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ games/consoles.php?console=$1
RewriteRule games/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ games/consoles.php?console=$1&page=$2
Using (.*?) would match even the / character so xbox/2 is treated as a whole
Try something like:
RewriteRule games/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ games/consoles.php?console=$1&page=$2 [L]
RewriteRule games/([^/]+)/?$ games/consoles.php?console=$1 [L]
I first put your most specific rule first - that way you don't do a general match, then a later more specific match mangles that general rewrite.
I also specified the [L] flag to signify that you want the engine to stop looking for more matches at this point. Re-ordering the rules is redundant in this case because of the [L] flag, but it's a good practice to get into.
I also changed the expressions slightly. Rather than using ([A-Za-z0-9]+) like the previous poster said, I changed it to ([^/]+) because that will match everything but a slash, so you can have weird console or game names. If you want to make it more specific feel free to, but this way provides the most general use-case.

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