Problem with htaccess GET form variables in a rewritten url - regex

Essentially my problem is thus; I have a MVC system that redirects all requests to index.php on my site. I have a rewrite rule in my htaccess file to handle those requests like so:
RewriteRule ^([a-zAZ\_\-]+)\/([a-zA-Z\_\-]+)\/([^\/?]*) /?module=$1&class=$2&event=$3
Which translates urls into these type of urls
http://example.com/users/login/
http://example.com/users/info/me
My problem is that I also want GET variables to be applied and used in the URL like so
http://example.com/users/login/?var1=val1&var2=val2
http://example.com/users/info/me?var1=val2...
I've written two different regexes that work perfectly well in a my workbench (expresso) and I've tested them out in PHP however they refuse to work in htaccess. They're not particular complex, I have tried:
^([a-zAZ_\-]+)\/([a-zA-Z_\-]+)\/([^\/\?]*)[\?]*(.*) /?module=$1&class=$2&event=$3&$4
and
^([a-zAZ_\-]+)\/([a-zA-Z_\-]+)\/([^\/\?]*)(?(?=\?)\?(.+)) /?module=$1&class=$2&event=$3&$4
Neither of these work and I'm racking my brains as to why. Essentially it just doesn't recognise the fourth group and returns nothing I thought it might have been due to it being next to an ampersand but I did &var=$4 as a test and it still fell over.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated as this is driving me insane.
Thanks in advance,
Rupert S.

After all, this is what you need:
RewriteRule ^([a-z_-]+)/([a-z_-]+)/([^/?]*) /?module=$1&class=$2&event=$3 [QSA,NC,L]
[QSA] will append the additional GET parameters to the rewritten query string.
[NC] since it is case insensitive, no need for A-Z matches

Related

htaccess regex variable parameter

I'm not used to regex and figure I've lost too many hours trying to resolve this, so thought I'd ask for help. I am trying to prettify the html extension.
My site will use URLs that have variable parameters. For example:
mysite.com/article/this-is-an-entry
mysite.com/article/this-is-an-entirely-different-entry
All will use .html as the extension.
In the htaccess file, I have tried
RewriteRule ^(article\/[a-z].*)$ $1.html [NC,L]
as well as slight variations of this, but cannot get this right. Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Firstly, let's look at the regex you have:
^(article/[a-z].*)$
This matches exactly the string "article/", followed by at least one letter (case insensitive due to the NC flag), followed by zero or more of anything. It's quite broad, but should match the examples you gave.
One way to test that it's matching is to add the R=temp flag to the rule, which tells Apache to redirect the browser to the new URL (I recommend using "=temp" to stop the browser caching the redirect and making later testing harder). You can then observe (e.g. in your browser's F12 debug console) the original request and the redirected one.
RewriteRule ^(article/[a-z].*)$ $1.html [NC,L,R=temp]
However, as CBroe points out, your rule will match again on the target URL, so you need to prevent that. A simple way would be to use the END flag instead of L:
Using the [END] flag terminates not only the current round of rewrite processing (like [L]) but also prevents any subsequent rewrite processing from occurring in per-directory (htaccess) context.
So:
RewriteRule ^(article/[a-z].*)$ $1.html [NC,END]
Alternatively, you can make your pattern stricter, such as changing the . ("anything") to [^.] ("anything other than a dot"):
^(article/[a-z][^.]*)$
To be even more specific, you can add a RewriteCond with an extra pattern to not apply the rule to, such as "anything ending .html".

How to redirect from specific subdirectory to a subdomain via .htaccess?

I've been trying to redirect this URL (and all its substructures):
http://example.com/archive/
to (and its corresponding substructures):
http://archive.example.com/
For example: http://example.com/archive/signature/logo.png ==> http://archive.example.com/signature/logo.png
I tried to generate an .htaccess rule using a generator and evaluating it by looking at the regex, which I can understand (I think).
The result was the following rule:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule http://example.com/archive/(.*) http://archive.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The way I see it, the server will proccess any URL that starts with http://example.com/archive/ , will capture the string that comes next and will change the whole initial portion with the subdomain structure and append the captured string.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work neither on my server, nor on online testing tools such as: http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/
Is there anything I'm missing there?
Thank you!
You should be able to try it this way.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^archive/(.*)$ http://archive.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Note that I did not make it dynamic as you didn't specific if you will have more URL's that need to work this way as well or not.

Target and rewrite one url ignoring any others, with the issue being that the others partially match it

Ive exhausted my patient first, my energy then, and finally my sanity, trying to make a rewrite redirect for a homepage of the kind:
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php
to
http://www.mydomain.com/
Ive indeed done that successfully with something like:
RewriteRule ^/index\.php$ /$ [R=301,L]
However the issue is that the rest of urls are done like this
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?page=this-is-a-page-title
Which makes the previous rewrite to break them turning them into:
http://www.mydomain.com/?page=this-is-a-page-title
Ive have not managed to properly write a rewritecond to exclude all urls containing the string
index.php?page=
Or preferably something to directly target the homepage only, this lead me to look for something to be put after the url like
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php(here)
that would tell mod_rewrite to not go for any url longer than that, but i could not understand how to do it either with a rewriterule only or with a rewritecond of the request_uri ! kind. And in fact found a post here where ppl stated that regex is to match something, and is not efficient at all to try match nothing. Ive tried near a hundred, remaking them with my best knowledge, and got most not working, and some directly breaking url, and even 500 errors.
You decide whatever you feel is the more efficient solution.
Ive learnt more than the almost nothing i knew about regex and mod_rewrite, but i think im past beyond the point were i should ask for some help. Ive tried for two days, read a lot, here and there, apache docs, and i have the feeling ive past almost touching the working line, probably with some mistake in punctuation. Im also interested in understanding whatever is shown here to fix what im sure is a misconception on my part either about regex or about how to properly lay in a correct order a rewrite or rewritecond like this.
You could use RewriteCond to condition the following rewrite rule. Something like this:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =""
RewriteRule ^/index\.php$ / [R=301,L]
The condition here is that the query string is empty, which seems to be what you want.

What's wrong with this regular expression in a .htaccess file?

I'm trying to understand why this regular expression isn't working in my .htaccess file. I want it so whenever a user goes to the job_wanted.php?jid=ID, they will be taken to job/ID.
What's wrong with this?
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} jid=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^job_wanted\.php?$ job/%1? [R]
I want it so when a user clicks on http://localhost/jobwehave.co.za/jobs/ID they are shown the same results as what below would show http://localhost/jobwehave.co.za/jobs?id=ID.
Sorry for the mix up. I still very confused to how this works.
The primary problem is that you can't match the query string as part of RewriteRule. You need to move that part into a RewriteCond statement.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} jid=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^job_wanted\.php$ /job/%1?
Editing to reflect your updated question, which is the opposite of what I've shown here. For the reverse, to convert /job/123 into something your PHP script can consume, you'll want:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/job/([0-9]+)$ /path/to/job_wanted.php?jid=$1
But you're probably going to have trouble putting this in an .htaccess file anywhere except the root, and maybe even there. If it works at the root, you'll likely need to strip the leading / from the RewriteRule I show here.
Second edit to reflect your comment: I think what you want is complicated, but this might work:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/job/([0-9]+)$ /path/to/job_wanted.php?jid=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} jid=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^job_wanted\.php$ http://host.name/job/%1? [R]
Your fundamental problem is that you want to "fix" existing links, presumably out of your control. In order to change the URL in the browser address bar, you must redirect the browser. There is no other way to do it.
That's what the second cond+rule does: it matches incoming old URLs and redirects to your pretty URL format. This either needs to go in a VirtualHost configuration block or in the .htaccess file in the same directory as your PHP script.
The first rule does the opposite: it converts the pretty URL back into something that Apache can use, but it does so using an internal sub-request that hopefully will not trigger another round of rewriting. If it does, you have an infinite loop. If it works, this will invoke your PHP script with a query string parameter for the job ID and your page will work as it has all along. Note that because this rule assumes a different, probably non-existent file system path, it must go in a VirtualHost block or in the .htaccess file at your site root, i.e. a different location.
Spreading the configuration around different places sounds like a recipe for future problems to me and I don't recommend it. I think you'll be better off to change the links under your control to the pretty versions and not worry about other links.
The ^ anchors the regex at the beginning of the string.
RewriteRule matches the URI beginning with a / (unless it's in some per-directory configuration area).
Either prefix the / or remove the anchor ^ (depending on what you want to achieve)
You haven't captured the job ID in the regex, so you can't reference it in the rewritten URL. Something like this (not tested, caveat emptor, may cause gastric distress, etc.):
RewriteRule ^job/([0-9]+) job_wanted.php?jid=$1
See Start Rewriting for a tutorial on this.
You need to escape the ? and . marks if you want those to be literals.
^job_wanted\.php\?jid=9\?$
But although that explains why your pattern isn't matching, it doesn't address the issue of your URL rewriting. I'm also not sure why you want the ^ and $ are there, since that will prevent it from matching most URLs (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/job_wanted.php?jid=9 won't work because it doesn't start with job_wanted.php).
I don't know htaccess well, so I can only address the regex portion of your question. In traditional regex syntax, you'd be looking for something like this:
s/job_wanted\.php\?jid=(\d*)/job\/$1/i
Hope that helps.
Did you try to escape special characters (like ?)?
The ? and . characters have a special meaning in regular expressions. You probably just need to escape them.
Also, you need to capture the jid value and use it in the rule.
Try to change your rules to this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^job_wanted\.php\?jid=([0-9]+)$ /job/$1
Something like
ReWriteRule ^job\_wanted\.php\?jid\=([0-9-]+)$ /job/$1
should do the trick.

Looking for some URL rewriting help

My question is a simple one, but I can't seem to find the answer. I'm currently working on some URL rewriting for a website, but I have encountered a problem. Currently the most basic rule I have goes something like this:
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]+)/(([a-zA-Z]+)/?$ index.php?mod=$1&com$2
This works in most cases, and I have some special cases for where this doesn't apply, however one of the pages needs to pass a lot of information through the URL, and I want to automatically rewrite this. Some examples:
website.com/asdf/jkl/id/5/page/2 should become website.com/index.php?mod=asdf&com=jkl&id=5&page=2
website.com/qwer/yuio/search/keyword/sort/alpha should become website.com/index.php?mod=qwer&com=yuio&search=keyword&sort=alpha
Is this possible? I could really use some help here... Thanks! :)
Depending on what language/framework you're using, it may be simpler to put the rewriting/dispatch in the script rather than attempt to do everything in mod_rewrite.
For example, if you were using PHP, given the URL:
http://www.example.com/asdf.php/jkl/id/5/page/2
a script at asf.php could read the PATH_INFO variable, split it on slashes, and write the values into the expected place in $_REQUEST.
Then all you need is one simple rewrite rule to elide the ‘.php’.
You could use a recursive rule:
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]+)/([a-zA-Z]+)/?$ index.php?mod=$1&com$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/[^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?(.*) $1/$4?$2=$3 [QSA]
But it sure would be easier to parse the request path with PHP.