URL Rewriting based on form input - .htaccess

I'm creating a frontpage for my website with a single form and input text, Google-style. It's working fine, however, I want to generate a pretty URL based on the input. Let's say, my input is called "id", and using the GET method of form, and the action defined to "/go/", on submission, the URL will be:
site.com/go/?id=whateverIType
and I want to change it to
site.com/go/whateverIType
I was thinking on Mod Rewrite, but if the user put something in the URL, like:
site.com/go/?dontwant=this&id=whateverIType&somemore=trash
I want to ignore the other variables but "id", and rewrite the rule.
What's the better way of get this done? Thanks in advance!
PS: I'm using CodeIgniter, maybe there's something I can use for it as well. I already have a controller for "go".

I'm not familiar with CodeIgniter, but you can try the following RewriteRule
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/go\/
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([^&]*)
RewriteRule (.*) /go/%1? [L,R]
The %1 references the regex group from the previous RewriteCond, and the trailing ? will strip the querystring from the redirected URL.
Hope this helps.

Mod_rewrite supports conditions and rules with RegEx, so you could have a rule that matched the ?id=XXXX, that would extract it from the URL (keeping the other parameters), and rewrote the URL accordingly.
However... I don't think you want to do this, because if you rewrite the URL to be /go/Some+Search+Query, you won't be able to pick it up with say, PHP, without parsing the URL out manually.
It's really tough to have custom, SEO-friendly URLs with user input, but it is technically possible. You're better off leaving in the ?id=XXX part, and instead, using mod_rewrite in the opposite approach... take all URLs that match the pattern /go/My+Search+Terms and translate that back into something like ?id=My+Search+Terms, that way you'll be able to easily parse out the value using the URL's GET parameters. This isn't an uncommon practice - Google actually still uses URL parameters for user input (example URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=test).
Just keep in mind that mod_rewrite rewrites the URL before anything else (even PHP), so anything you do to the URL you need to handle. Think of mod_rewrite as a regular expression-based, global "Find and Replace" for URLs, every time a page is called on the server. For example, if you remove the query string, you need to make sure your website/application/whatever accounts for that.

In application/config/routes.php
$route['go/(:any)'] = "go/index/$1";
Where go is your controller and index is the index action.
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/routing.html
You can use something like this in your .htaccess if you aren't already:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|css|js|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Related

RewriteRule from download.php?token=something into /download/something

I am working on url, I try htaccess, php, javascript and many other things but unable to figure it out.
My url is :
example/cheap-flight-to.php?country=lagos
and I want to change the url something like this :
example/cheap-flight-to.lagos
or
example/cheap-flight-to/lagos
please help me
The following should allow you to generate your urls in the format that you wish.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^example/cheap-flight-to/([a-zA-Z]+)$ /example/cheap-flight-to.php?country=$1 [NC,L]
What you want could be done using regular expressions in .htaccess, but it makes no sence, since it wouldn't be pointing to anything, unless you have a directory cheap-flight-to/lago in which you have an index.php that will show-up in the browser or return data. This means you have to setup a directory for each destination you want to go to. Is that really what you want? Usually it's been used the otherway around. The user (or a script for that matter) enters a url like "example/cheap-flight-to/lagos". Then through regular expressions in .htaccess you rewrite the url to "example/cheap-flight-to.php?country=lagos".
Have a look at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/misc/rewriteguide.html and
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html for more on rewriting rules in .htaccess.

Htaccess search redirect with query parameters

I've run into a problem with the way that search on my site is working, and I couldn't find a great example of this issue on here. When a user submits an empty search the search doesn't function correctly. However, if I put a plus sign in the search parameter search works fine; even when the search is empty. I was thinking that I could use htaccess to fix this issue. Here's what I've got so far:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=$
RewriteRule ^ /?s=+ [L,R=301]
This works fine if the url is like:
http://mysite.com/?s=
However, my search queries more often look like:
http://mysite.com/?s=&zipcode=XXXXX&submit=Submit
Where XXXXX is a zip code. Is there a way to allow this redirect to fire, even if there are additional parameters behind the ?s= parameter while still preserving the additional parameters (for example, I wouldn't want to lose the zipcode parameter on redirect)?
Thank you for looking!
Try:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=($|&.*$)
RewriteRule ^ /?s=+%1 [L,R=301]
The expression ($|&.*$) creates a grouping that is either the end of the query string, or a & followed by whatever. This grouping is backreferenced using the %1 in the rule.

.htaccess and dynamically generated SEO friendly URLs

I'm trying to build a website that may be called from the URL bar with any one of the following examples:
domainname.com/en
domainname.com/zh-cn/
domainname.com/fr/page1
domainname.com/ru/dir1/page2
domainname.com/jp/dir1/page2/
domainname.com/es-mx/dir1/dir2/page3.html
These page requests need to hit my .htaccess template and ultimately be converted into this php call:
/index.php?lng=???&tpl=???
I've been trying to make RewriteCond and RewriteRule code that will safely deal with the dynamic nature of the URLs I'm trying to take in but totally defeated. I've read close to 50 different websites and been working on this for almost a week now but I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't even know if I should be using a RewriteCond. Here is my last attempt at making a RewriteRule myself:
RewriteRule ^(([a-z]{2})(-[a-z]{2})?)([a-z0-9-\./]*) /index.php?lng=$1&tpl=$4 [QSA,L,NC]
Thanks for any help,
Vince
What's causing your loop is that your regex pattern matching /index.php. Why? Let's take a look:
First, the prefix is stripped because these are rules in an htaccess file, so the URI after the first rewrite is: index.php (query string is separate)
The beginning of your regex: ^(([a-z]{2})(-[a-z]{2})?), matches in in the URI
The next bit of your regex: ([a-z0-9-\./]*) matches dex.php. Thus the rule matches and gets applied again, and will continue to get applied until you've reached the internal recursion limit.
Your URL structure:
domainname.com/en
domainname.com/zh-cn/
domainname.com/fr/page1
domainname.com/ru/dir1/page2
domainname.com/jp/dir1/page2/
domainname.com/es-mx/dir1/dir2/page3.html
Either has a / after the country code or nothing at all, so you need to account for that:
# here -------------------v
^(([a-z]{2})(-[a-z]{2})?)(/([a-z0-9-\./]*))?$
# and an ending match here ------------^
You shouldn't need to change anything else:
RewriteRule ^(([a-z]{2})(-[a-z]{2})?)(/([a-z0-9-\./]*))?$ /index.php?lng=$1&tpl=$4 [QSA,L,NC]

Rewrite rule in htaccess to keep parameters

I've written the following rewrite rule which works fine when no parameters (no page numbers, no products per page, no sort order etc)
RewriteRule ^(?!bench/).*cat_2.html(\.[a-z]{3,4})?(.*) "http\:\/\/www\.mysite\.co\.uk\/bench\/cat_2\.html\?mode\=allBrands" [R=301,L]
This makes sure the URL is optimized on Googles results. So
http://www.mysite.co.uk/bench-clothing/cat_2.html?mode=allBrands#
gets changed to
http://www.mysite.co.uk/bench/cat_2.html?mode=allBrands
mode=allBrands will always be set.
So if i click on a link to go to
http://www.mysite.co.uk/bench-clothing/cat_2.html?mode=allBrands&ppp=64&sort=desc&page=2
it gets redirected to
http://www.mysite.co.uk/bench/cat_2.html?mode=allBrands
which is the first page.
Any help would be great.
change [R=301,L] to [R=301,L,QSA]
More info : https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/flags.html#flag_qsa
You need to add a QSA flag to your rewrite rule, so that the brackets look like this:
[R=301,L,QSA]
This tells apache to append any existing query string to the new query string in the target (mode=allBrands).

htaccess to rewrite param=NUMBER into /text

I am trying to figure out how to rewrite URLs from something like this:
example.com/collection.php?collection=1
Into:
example.com/collection-name.php
I recently redesigned an e-commerce site and need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. I've seen loads of instructions on how to use the value of collection=1 in a rewritten URL but not how to use text instead of the value. There are only 5 collection values that need to be redirected but in addition there are also old URLs that have multiple params in them that also need to be rewritten/redirected as text. I hop that made sense.
So I think I can get them all worked out if I can get the initial redirect set up.
Other/more complex old URLs look like this:
example.com/collection.php?collection=1&product=2&item=3
Which would then need to be redirected to:
example.com/collection-name/sub-collection-name/product-name.php
Not sure exactly how to go about doing this. I don't want to write line after line in the .htaccess file but I have no idea of how else to accomplish this.
Thanks in advance, I appreciate andy and all help in this matter!
EDIT------------------------------------
Here's my new rewrite condition and rule based on the info provided to me. This would be the rule for the URLs containing all the query params using 3 separate RewriteMaps.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} collection=([^&]+)&product=([^&]+)&item=([^&]+)
RewriteRule collection.php shop/${categorymap:%1}/${rangemap:%2}/${productmap:%3}\.php [R=301,L]
Please let me know if anything looks off or I missed anything. Wasn;t sure if I needed to use $1, $2, $3 for each of the query params. I'm still a NOOB with rewrites. Thanks!
Edit------------------------------------------------------
Using the following code in my .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} collection=([^&]+)
RewriteRule collection.php shop/${categorymap:%1}\.php [R=301,L]
My URLs that start as "example.com/collection.php?collection=1
Are being rewritten as: example.com/shop/.php?collection=1
I am a bit lost on this one. Could it be that my Redirect Maps are not being read? Or is it something else? Thanks for the help.
You want to look into using a RewriteMap. You can specify the maps you want for collection, sub-collection and products, and then look up the text for each number.
So you would define a RewriteMap in your virtualhost config with something like
RewriteMap categmap txt:/path/to/category/map.txt
Then your rewrite rule would look something like
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} collection=([^&]+)
RewriteRule collection.php ${categmap:%1} [L,R]
Add more RewriteConds for your more complicated cases and make separate rules out of them. Place the more specific rules first in the file, then the more general ones.

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