I'm new to using the URL Rewrite module and I'm having trouble with what I thought would be a simple URL rewrite for forum threads (using IIS 7.5)
I need to rewrite:
/forum/100/2534/friendly-title
or:
/forum/100/2534/334/comment/friendly-thread-title
to:
/forum/?forum=100&thread=2534&post=334&postType=comment
The rule that I have written (not working) is:
^forum/([1-9][0-9][0-9]*)/([1-9]*)/(([1-9]*)/(post|comment)/)?([a-zA-Z0-9-]{5,50})$
Which maps to:
/forum/?forum={R:1}&thread={R:2}&post={R:4}&postType={R:5}
I'm getting a 404 error.
It's correct that {R:4} and {R:5} are empty when you use the first URL. That's because there are no values for these fields. The RegEx still matches though so the URL will still be rewritten. Your code should properly handle empty values for the post and postType querystring parameters to display the entire thread and not just a specific comment (at least that what I assume is suppose to happen).
By the way, a more logical URL structure would be:
/forum/100/2534/friendly-thread-title/comment/334
This won't help you this this particular problem though but just on a side note.
Related
I guess, this is an easy one but anyway, I haven't figured it out yet.
After migrating my website from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 the structure of categories and articles will change. That's why I will need some rules in .htaccess to redirect the old urls to the new ones.
The website is hosted on an Apache server.
The old URL structure looks something like that.
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/[articleID]-[articleAlias].html
[articleID] is a digit.
[articleAlias], e.g. „this-is-article-number-233“
This should be redirected to...
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/[articleAlias].html
An example:
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/2324-this-is-my-latest-article.html
… should be redirected to...
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/this-is-my-latest-article.html
I've played around with RedirectMatch and Rewrite Rule but haven't been successful to make it work. How do I get rid of the article id?
My latest try failed with...
RedirectMatch ^category/subcategory/item/([0-9]+)-(.*)$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1
Is there a simple and elegant solution to this? Thanks in advance!
UPDATE
Maybe it's more complex than I thought it was.
Main problem is that not only my categories changed but also the ids of the articles.
So, to stick with my example...
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/2324-this-is-my-latest-article.html
first turns into something like:
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/1223-this-is-my-latest-article.html
Anyway, Joomla 4 is able to drop the article id automatically (guess with an internal rewrite) for seo-friendly URLs. I activated that feature to make the new URLs look like
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/[articleAlias].html
The [articleAlias] stays the same.
A redirection according to what you actually ask should be possible like that:
RewriteEngine on
RedirectRule ^/?category/subcategory/item/[0-9]+-(.*)\.html$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1.html [R,L]
However I doubt that this really is what you want: this completely drops the numeric ID of the resource. Which means that it won't be available for processing when the redirected request comes back requesting the new, stripped URL. How do you want to internally rewrite that request back to the internal resource then, without that ID?
I made some more tests and it this is the final solution to my problem:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/?category/subcategory/item/[0-9]+-(.*)\.html$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1.html
Our old website has a search URL structure like this:
example.com/Country/United States/Region/California/Area/Southern California/City/San Diego/Suburb/South Park/Type/House/Bedrooms/4/Bathrooms/3/
This is currently rewritten to point to the physical page:
/search/index.aspx
The parameters in the URL can be mixed up in different orders, and the URL can include one or more parameters.
We want to 301 redirect these old URLs to a new structure that is ordered in a logical way and more concise:
example.com/united-states/california/southern-california/san-diego/south-park/?type=house&bedrooms=4&bathrooms=3
example.com/united-states/california/?type=house&bedrooms=4&bathrooms=3
Is there a way with URL rewriting to interrogate the old URL, work out what parameters are existing and then write out the new URL structure?
Even if we can limit it to just the Country, Region, Area, City and Suburb, that may be good enough to at least return some results even if it's not perfect.
Also, spaces should be turned into hyphens and all text made lowercase.
I already have the RewriteRule to turn the new URL structure into a URL to point to a physical page. It's just transforming the old URL in to the new URL I need help with. I've googled endlessly and it's just beyond me!
Can anyone help? Thanks.
Since you already have the old search page with rewriting rules set up for it and which is capable of parsing all parameters you need, the easiest and most appropriate solution I see here is to issue a redirect you require from this old search page's code. Just put the code that composes new URL with all parameters needed and redirects from this page - this should be a lot easier than trying to parse all these parameters in .htaccess and combine them into the new format.
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=$1
Then in your web application can get the parameters from the CGI parameter called params . They look like this now param1-val1-param3-val3-param4-val4. Your code should then split on the hyphens, and then put the parameters into a map. Most web frameworks support some way of adding to or overriding the request parameters. If so, you can do this without doing invasive modifications to the rest of your code.
I am trying to figure out how to use the ampersand symbol in an url.
Having seen it here: http://www.indeed.co.uk/B&Q-jobs I wish to do something similar.
Not exactly sure what the server is going to call when the url is accessed.
Is there a way to grab a request like this with .htaccess and rewrite to a specific file?
Thanks for you help!
Ampersands are commonly used in a query string. Query strings are one or more variables at the end of the URL that the page uses to render content, track information, etc. Query strings typically look something like this:
http://www.website.com/index.php?variable=1&variable=2
Notice how the first special character in the URL after the file extension is a ?. This designates the start of the query string.
In your example, there is no ?, so no query string is started. According to RFC 1738, ampersands are not valid URL characters except for their designated purposes (to link variables in a query string together), so the link you provided is technically invalid.
The way around that invalidity, and what is likely happening, is a rewrite. A rewrite informs the server to show a specific file based on a pattern or match. For example, an .htaccess rewrite rule that may work with your example could be:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?B&Q-(.*)$ /scripts/b-q.php?variable=$1 [NC,L]
This rule would find any URL's starting with http://www.indeed.co.uk/B&Q- and show the content of http://www.indeed.co.uk/scripts/b-q.php?variable=jobs instead.
For more information about Apache rewrite rules, check out their official documentation.
Lastly, I would recommend against using ampersands in URLs, even when doing rewrites, unless they are part of the query string. The purpose of an ampersand in a URL is to string variables together in a query string. Using it out of that purpose is not correct and may cause confusion in the future.
A URI like /B&Q-jobs gets sent to the server encoded like this: /B%26Q-jobs. However, when it gets sent through the rewrite engine, the URI has already been decoded so you want to actually match against the & character:
Rewrite ^/?B&Q-jobs$ /a/specific/file.html [L]
This makes it so when someone requests /B&Q-jobs, they actually get served the content at /a/specific/file.html.
I'd like to create a rewrite in .htaccess for my site so that when a user asks for URL A, the content comes from URL B, but the user still sees the URL as being URL A.
So, for example, let's say I have content at mydomain.com/projects/project-example. I want users to be able to ask for mydomain.com/project-example, still see that URL in their address bar, but the browser should display the content from mydomain.com/projects/project-example.
I've looked through several .htaccess rewrite tips and FAQs, but unfortunately none of them seemed to present a solution for exactly what I've described above. Not everything on my domain will be coming from the /projects/ directory, so I'd imagine the rewrite should check to see if the page exists first so it's not appending /projects/ to every url. I'm really stumped.
If a rewrite is not exactly what I need, or if there is a simple solution for this problem, I'd love to hear it.
This tutorial should have everything that you need, including addressing exactly what you are asking: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html . It may just be a matter of terminology.
So, for example, let's say I have content at mydomain.com/projects/project-example. I want users to be able to ask for mydomain.com/project-example, still see that URL in their address bar, but the browser should display the content from mydomain.com/projects/project-example.
With something like:
RewriteRule ^project-example$ /projects/project-example [L]
When someone requests http://mydomain.com/project-example and the URI /project-example gets rewritten internally to /projects/project-example. Note that when this is in an .htaccess file, the URI /project-example gets the leading slash removed when matching.
If you have a directory of stuff, you can use regular expressions and back-references, for example you want any request for http://mydomain.com/stuff/ to map to /internal/stuff/:
RewriteRule ^stuff/(.*)$ /internal/stuff/$1 [L]
So requests for http://mydomain.com/stuff/file1.html, http://mydomain.com/stuff/image1.png, etc. get rewritten to /internal/stuff/file1.html, /internal/stuff/image1.png, etc.