Nginx regular expression fails - regex

Question

When I visit the http://example.com or http://example.com/index.html still goes to handleURL.html
This is what I have
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/vhosts/example.com/public;
index index.html;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/example.com/error.log;
rewrite "^/([a-z0-9]{4,8})$" /forward.php?shortcode=$1;
rewrite "^/.{10,500}$" /handleURL.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri /index.php =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
I want to display different html file if the url has characters between 10,500.

Answer 1

Nginx might not care but it looks like the regular expression should not be in quotes. Unless your going to use the entered string in your replacement url you don't need to capture it, so the parenthesis are unnecessary.
If you want to choose a different file for each string you can use the captured string in the replacement string. e.g. rewrite "^/(.{10,500})$" /wiki/$1 last; would match example.com/agreatpage.html and turn it into example.com/wiki/agreatepage.html
To simply redirect to another page based on length something like rewrite "^/.{10,500}$" /Redirect.html last; should work
References:
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_rewrite_module.html
Edit:
After further reading nginx is okay if the regular expression is enclosed in double quotes and you must do so if the expression contains { or }, otherwise the parser misinterprets these as opening a block and closing a block.
Edit2:
The only problem I see at the moment is:
rewrite "^/([a-z0-9]{4,8})$" /forward.php?shortcode=$1;
rewrite "^/.{10,500}$" /handleURL.html;
to the best of my knowledge should be:
rewrite "^/([a-z0-9]{4,8})$" /forward.php?shortcode=$1 last;
rewrite "^/.{10,500}$" /handleURL.html last;

Answer 2

The only way I can fix this remove all the rewrites and add index.php and pass everything to index.php I ended up with the following configuration.
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/vhosts/example.com/public;
index index.php index.html;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
log_format compression '$host - $remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
'"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent '
'"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$gzip_ratio"';
access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com/access.log compression;
error_log /var/log/nginx/example.com/error.log;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri /index.php =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
Thank you guys!