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=$3
Please note that 1 and 2 are completely arbitrary (they could be any other string).
Naturally, the official docs are there to help.
I'm new to using the URL Rewrite module and I'm having trouble with what I thought would be a simple URL rewrite for forum threads (using IIS 7.5)
I need to rewrite:
/forum/100/2534/friendly-title
or:
/forum/100/2534/334/comment/friendly-thread-title
to:
/forum/?forum=100&thread=2534&post=334&postType=comment
The rule that I have written (not working) is:
^forum/([1-9][0-9][0-9]*)/([1-9]*)/(([1-9]*)/(post|comment)/)?([a-zA-Z0-9-]{5,50})$
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.
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 have a script on my site ('write-review.php') that takes an optional url parameter 'site'. So server-side requests could be:
/reviews/write-review.php
or
/reviews/write-review.php?site=foo
I'm using .htaccess to create search engine friendly URLs and hide my php extensions, so that requests to this script are respectively rewritten as
/reviews/write-a-review/
or
/reviews/write-a-review/foo
I think having 'foo' in the URL may cause confusion for my users, so I'm trying to write an htaccess rewrite rule that removes 'foo' while still passing this variable to my script. Thus, a request to /reviews/write-a-review/foo would be rewritten as /reviews/write-a-review/ but write-review.php would be passed 'foo'.
The rewrite rule I currently have in place is:
RewriteRule ^reviews/write-a-review/?$ reviews/write-review.php
RewriteRule ^reviews/write-a-review/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/?$ reviews/write-review.php?site=$1
Is it even possible to do what I've described above? There are MANY questions on Stack Overflow that are similar to this, and I've read through at least a dozen, but I haven't found a way to do this specifically.
Any help is really appreciated.
Thanks,
Chris
Is it even possible to do what I've described above?
No. To alter the actual URL the user inputs, you'd have to do a header redirect, during which you would lose foo.
This is not possible, except maybe by using ridiculous technical tricks like storing foo in a session variable or something. I would not recommend going that route.
I want to redirect every post 301 redirect, but I have over 3000 posts.
If I list
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/23/post/
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post1.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/24/post1/
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post2.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/25/post2/
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post3.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/26/post3/
Redirect per......
for over 3000 url redirect command in .htaccess would this eat my server resource or cause some problem? Im not sure how .htaccess work but if the server is looking at these lists each time user requests for page, I would guess it will be a resource hog.
I can't use RedirectMatch because I added date variable in my new url. Do you have any other suggestions redirecting these posts? Or am I just fine?
Thanks!
I am not an Apache expert, so I cannot speak to whether or not having 3,000 redirects in .htaccess is a problem (though my gut tells me it probably is a bad idea). However, as a simpler solution to your problem, why not use mod_rewrite to do your redirects?
RewriteRule ^/blog/(.+)/(.+)/(.+).html$ http://new.blog.com/$1/$2/$3/ [R=permanent]
This uses a regex to match old URLs and rewrite them to new ones. The [R=permanent] instructs mod_rewrite to issue a 301 with the new URL instead of silently rewriting the request internally.
In your example, it looks like you've added the day of the post to the URL, which does not exist in the old URL. Since you obviously cannot use a regexp to divine the day an arbitrary post was made, this method may not work for you. If you can drop the day from the URL, then you're good to go.
Edit: The first time I read your question, I missed the last paragraph. ("I can't use RedirectMatch because I added date variable in my new url.") In this case, you can use mod_rewrite's RewriteMap to lookup the day component of a post.
You have two options:
Use a hashmap to perform fast lookups in a static file. This means all your old URLs will work, but any new posts cannot be accessed using the old URL scheme.
Use a script to grab the day.
In option one, create a file called posts.txt and put:
/yyyy/mm/pppp dd
...for each post where yyyy is the year of the post, mm is the month, and pppp is the post name (without the .html).
When you're done, run:
$ httxt2dbm -i posts.txt -o posts.map
Then we add to to the server/virtual server config: (Note the path is a filesystem path, not a URL.)
RewriteMap postday dbm:/path/to/file/posts.map
RewriteRule ^/blog/(.+)/(.+)/(.+).html$ http://new.blog.com/$1/$2/${postday:$1/$2/$3}/$3/ [R=permanent]
In option two, use pgm:/path/to/script/lookup.whatever as your RewriteMap. See the mod_rewrite documentation for more info about using a script.
Doing the lookup in mod_rewrite is better than just redirecting to a script which looks up the date and then redirects to the final destination because you should never redirect more than once. Issuing a 301 or 302 incurs a round trip cost, which increases the latency of your page load time.
If you have some way in code to determine the day of a post, you can generate the rewrite on the fly. You can setup a mod_rewrite pattern, something like .html and set up a front controller pattern to calculate the new url from the old and issue the 301 header.
With php as an example:
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']
will contain the requested url and
header("Location: http://new.blog.com/$y/$m/$d/$title/",TRUE,301);
will send a redirect.
That's... a lot of redirects. But the first thing I would tell you, and probably the only thing I can tell you without qualification, is that you should run some tests and see what the access times for your blog are like, and also look at the server's CPU and memory usage while you're doing it. If they're fairly low even with that giant list of redirects, you're okay as long as your blog doesn't experience a sudden increase in traffic. (I strongly suspect the 3000 rewrites will be slowing Apache down a lot, though)
That being said, I would second josh's suggestion of replacing the redirects with something dynamic. Like animuson said, if you're willing to drop the day from the URL, it'll be easy to set up a RewriteRule directive to handle the redirection. Otherwise, you could do it with a PHP script, or generally some code in whatever scripting language you (can) use. If you're using one of the popular blog engines, it probably contains code to do this already. Basically you could do something like
RewriteRule .* /blog/index.php
and just let the PHP script sort out which post was requested. It has access to the database so it'll be able to do that, and then you can either display the post directly from the PHP script, or to recover your original redirection behavior, you can send a Location header with the correct URL.
An alternative would be to use RewriteMap, which lets you write a RewriteRule where the target is determined by a program or file of your choice instead of being directly specified in the configuration file. As one option, you can specify a text file that contains the old and new URLs, and Apache will handle searching the file for the appropriate line for any given request. Read the documentation (linked above) for the full details. I will mention that this isn't used very often, and I'm not sure how much faster it would be compared to just having 3000 redirects.
Last tip: Apache can be significantly faster if you're able to move the configuration directives (like Redirect) into the server or virtual host configuration file, and disable reading of .htaccess entirely. I would guess that moving 3000 directives from .htaccess into the virtual host configuration could make your server considerably faster. But even moving the directives into the vhost config file probably wouldn't produce as much of a speedup as using a single RewriteRule.
It's never a good idea to make a massive list of Redirects. A better programming technique is to simply redirect the pages without that date variable then have a small PHP snippet that detects if it's missing and redirects to the URL with it included. The long list looks tacky and slows down Apache because it's checking that URL (any every other URL that might not even be affected by this) against each line. If it were only 5 or so, I'd say fine, but 3,000 is a definite NO.
Although I'm not a big fan of this method, a better choice would be to redirect all those URLs normally using a single match statement, redirecting them to the page without the date part, or with a dash or something, then include a small PHP snippet to check if the date is valid and if not, rewrite the path again to the correctly formed URL.
Honestly, if you didn't have that part there before, you don't need it now, and it will probably just confuse the search engines changing the URL for 3,000 posts. You don't really need a date in the URL, a good title is much more meaningful not only to users, but also to search engines, than a bunch of numbers.