Create redirect for changing destination - regex

Is it possible to create a 301 redirection where the name of the destination has a part in it, that changes every once in a while?
In my example I have to redirect a page to another one. However, the destination URL has a date attached to it, that sometimes is being changed.
The destination page (it's actually a PDF) looks similar to this:
example.com/this-is-a-recurring-event-05-04-19.pdf
The bold part changes sometimes, so I cannot simply write a redirection to that specific page. Is it possible to use some kind of wildcard within the destination?

Related

How to Make Relative Href Work in SvelteKit?

I want to build a Web app with SvelteKit with one page listing all items (with potential search query parameters), and then one page for each individual item. If I had to build this the old school way with everything generated in the backend, my paths would be /items/ for a the listing of items, and /items/123 for item 123, etc. That is, to go to the page of item 123, a link will with href="123" will work no matter if you are currently at the index (/items/) or at the page of one particuler item (/items/[id]).
With SvelteKit, if I create files routes/items/index.svelte and routes/items/[id].svelte, then routes/items/index.svelte will have path /items, without a trailing slash, and as a result a link with href="123" will lead to /123, resulting in a "not found" error.
This same link will work however from the page of an individual item, say, /items/456.
This is radically different from what you would have in the traditional HTML model, where a link from /items/ (or /items/index.html) would work the same as a link from /items/[id].html.
Now in svelte.config.js there is a trailingSlash option you can set to always so that routes/items/index.svelte corresponds to path /items/, but then routes/items/[id].svelte has path /items/[id]/ and we have the same problem again: one href value cannot work from both the index and the page of an individual item.
The only way I see right now is to use absolute path, but it's not very composable. My guess is that there is something I am doing wrong.
You're not missing anything - it's not currently possible in SvelteKit to have a trailing slash for some pages but not for others. There is an open GitHub issue you may be interested in that proposes adding additional trailingSlash options. This issue cites the exact problem you described:
The trailingSlash options introduced in #1404 don't make it straightforward to add trailing slashes to index pages but not to leaf pages. For example you might want to have /blog/ and /blog/some-post rather than /blog and /blog-some-post, since that allows the index page to contain relative links.
Until that feature is added, you'll need to use absolute paths.

Alternative to <!--#include virtual="somefilename"-->

I have a website running an an old apache server with SSI enabled. My host wants to move to a new server which has SSI disabled for security reasons.
I have a whole lot of pages with Google Friendly urls which just have one line
<!--#include virtual="Url_Including_Search_String"-->
What is the best alternative to the SSI to keep my google friendly search strings returning the specified search result?
I can achieve most of the results with rewrite rules in the .htaccess file, however some search strings have a space in the keyword but the url doesn't. I can't do this with a rewrite rule
ie www.somedomain.com.au/SYDNEY.htm would have
<!--#include virtual="/search.php?keyword=SYDNEY&Submit=SEARCH"-->
However,the issue is
www.somedomain.com.au/POTTSPOINT.htm would have
<!--#include virtual="/search.php?keyword=POTTS+POINT&Submit=SEARCH"-->
A rewrite rule cannot detect where a space should be in a Suburb name, so hoping there is an alternative for <!--#include virtual=
I have looked at RewriteMap but don't think I can access the file I would need to put this in.
I would use Mod Rewrite to redirect any calls to non-existent files to your Search page.
For example:
http://example.com/SYDNEY redirects to
http://example.com/search.php?q=SYDNEY
(assuming there is not actually a /SYDNEY/ file at your server root.)
Then get rid of all those individual redirect pages.
As for the spaces, I'd modify my actual Search page to recognize (for example) "POTTSPOINT" and figure out that the space should be inserted. Basically compare the search term against a database of substitutions.

Use RegEx to redirect using data from files

Recently, we restructured a large site of one of our customers. This caused all the news-articels on that site to be on a different place. Problem is that the google cache is still showing them on the old location, leading to A LOT of 404 not founds ( its about 1400 news entries ).
Normally, a redirect using somewhat simple regex would be fine, but not only the path to the news did change, but also some parameters. Example:
Old Url:
http://www.customers-url.com/old/path/to/the/news/details/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=67&cHash=a782f3027c4d00face6df122a76c38ed
How the new url should look like:
http://www.customers-url.com/new/path/to/news/?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=65
As you can see, the parameter D did change from 67 to 65 and the part of the URL before the ? did also change. Also, tx_ttnews has changed to tx_news and tt_news changed to news and the &cHash part did fall away completely.
I have the changed ids in a csv in the following format:
old_id, new_id
1,2
2,3
...etc...
Same goes the the changed url part before the ?. Since im not exactly an expert in using regex my question is:
Can this be done inside the .htaccess using RegEx ( not sure if it can even use a file as input)? How complicated is that? And how would such a regular expression look like?
Rather than trying to use .htaccess, it would be easier to manage and easier to code if you simply make a new page that responds on the old url (/old/path/to/the/news/details), then make that page build the new url and return a 301 to the browser with that new url.

Is there a "clean URL" (mod_rewrite) equivalent for iPlanet?

I'm working with Coldfusion (because I have to) and we use iPlanet 7 (because we have to), and I would like to pass clean URL's instead of the query-param junk (for numerous reasons). My problem is I don't have access to the overall obj.conf file, and was wondering if there were .htaccess equivalents I could pass on the fly per directory. Currently I am using Application.cfc to force the server to look at index.cfm in root before loading the requested page, but this requires a .cfm file is passed, so it just 404's out if the user provides /path/to/file but no extension. Ultimately, I would like to allow the user to pass domain.com/path/to/file but serve domain.com/index.cfm?q1=path&q2=to&q3=file. Any ideas?
You can mod_dir with the DirectoryIndex directive to set which page is served on /directory/ requests.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_dir.html
I'm not sure what exists for iPlanet, haven't had to work with it before. But it would be possible to use a url like index.cfm/path/to/file, and pull the extra path information via the cgi.path_info variable. Not exactly what you're looking for, but cleaner that query-params.

What does this URL mean?

http://localhost/students/index.cfm/register?action=studentreg
I did not understand the use of 'register' after index.cfm. Can anyone please help me understand what it could mean? There is a index.cfm file in students folder. Could register be a folder name?
They might be using special commands within their .htaccess files to modify the URL to point to something else.
Things like pointing home.html -> index.php?p=home
ColdFusion will execute index.cfm. It is up to the script to decide what to do with the /register that comes after.
This trick is used to build SEO friendly URL's. For example http://www.ohnuts.com/buy.cfm/bulk-nuts-seeds/almonds/roasted-salted - buy.com uses the /bulk-nuts-seeds/almonds/roasted-salted to determine which page to show.
Whats nice about this is it avoids custom 404 error handlers and URL rewrites. This makes it easier for your application to directly manage the URL's used.
I don't know if it works on all platforms, as I've only used it on IIS.
You want to look into the cgi.PATH_INFO variable, it is populated automatically by CF server when such URL format used.
Better real-life example would look something like this.
I have an URL which I want to make prettier:
http://mybikesite/index.cfm?category=bicycles&manufacturer=cannondale&model=trail-sl-4
I can rewrite it this way:
http://mybikesite/index.cfm/category/bicycles/manufacturer/cannondale/model/trail-sl-4
Our cgi.PATH_INFO value is: /category/bicycles/manufacturer/cannondale/model/trail-sl-4
We can parse it using list functions to get the same data as original URL gives us automatically.
Second part of your URL is plain GET variable, it is pushed into URL scope as usually.
Both formats can be mixed, GET vars may be used for paging or any other secondary stuff.
index.cfm is using either a CFIF IsDefind("register") or a CFIF #cgi.Path_Info# CONTAINS statements to execute a function or perform a logic step.