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/$1
should do the trick.
Related
I'm not used to regex and figure I've lost too many hours trying to resolve this, so thought I'd ask for help. I am trying to prettify the html extension.
My site will use URLs that have variable parameters. For example:
mysite.com/article/this-is-an-entry
mysite.com/article/this-is-an-entirely-different-entry
All will use .html as the extension.
In the htaccess file, I have tried
RewriteRule ^(article\/[a-z].*)$ $1.html [NC,L]
as well as slight variations of this, but cannot get this right. Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Firstly, let's look at the regex you have:
^(article/[a-z].*)$
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".
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/$1 [R=301,L]
Note that I did not make it dynamic as you didn't specific if you will have more URL's that need to work this way as well or not.
I wrote the following in htaccess in the process of learning:
RewriteRule ^/test(a-zA-z)\.htm$ /test$1.htm
And test2.htm still gets mapped to test1.htm
I'm assuming the $1 is not being treated as the variable placeholder properly because $ is not escaped. What is the right way of writing this (so that for test purpose, test2.htm gets mapped to itself, test2.thm)
Ultimately, I'm trying to map something like:
domain.com/$1/$2
to
domain.com/?a=$1&b=$2
or
domain.com/$1
to
domain.com/?a=$1
I do not want the URL of the browser to change when the first url is mapped to the second. I know this is possible in C# Global.asax file (using routes.MapRoute), but not sure how to get this happening in php.
Proceed by elimination, from the most complex to the less complex.
handle first 2 params, then QSA directive (important) to keep all GET variables, then L directive to stop all,
then handle first 1 param, then QSA directive (important) to keep all GET variables, then L directive to stop all,
That should work:
RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-z0-9]+)/([a-zA-z0-9]+)$ /?a=$1&b=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-z0-9]+)$ /?a=$1 [QSA,L]
Oh by the way:
Here's the wiki of serverfault.com
The howto's htaccess official guide
The official mod_rewrite guide
And if that's not enough:
Two hints:
If you're not in a hosted environment (= if it's your own server and you can modify the virtual hosts, not only the .htaccess files), try to use the RewriteLog directive: it helps you to track down such problems:
# Trace:
# (!) file gets big quickly, remove in prod environments:
RewriteLog "/web/logs/mywebsite.rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9
RewriteEngine On
My favorite tool to check for regexp:
http://www.quanetic.com/Regex (don't forget to choose ereg(POSIX) instead of preg(PCRE)!)
When want to write something like a range you should use []. e.g:
RewriteRule ^/test([a-zA-z0-9]+)\.htm$ /index.php?data=$1 [L]
For me this was the simplest article I found which really helped me to figure out what I needed and worked in the end, so I'll share it here and try to use the terms which makes sense to me.
http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite
RewriteRule ^page/([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]
The right hand side (index.php?page=$1) is the destination which is hidden from the browser.
The left hand side is the mapping rule.
The variable parsed from the left - $1 need not be right at the end of the string and can be anywhere in the middle, for example, /CHECK/?VAR=$1MORETEXT or if there are more variables to parse from the left, it could be "/CHECK/?VAR=$1MORETEXT$2".
The "/?" is optional, if it is desired for the destination URL to not have a "/" at the end, don't include it and just end with the $ like ^page/([^/\.]+)$
The [L] is useful because it stops the htaccess from wasting time reading onwards once a matching Rule is found.
I am working on a helicon rule and tried various combinations but they didn't work
I want the following URL to be resolved.
It can be this
www.test.com/myownpages/
or
www.test.com/myownpages
www.test.com/myownpages/?value1=test2&value2=test2
it should be resolved to
$1/test.aspx [NC]
If anyone gives something after myownpages, it shouldn't work
www.test.com/myownpages/test (This shouldn't work)
It tried the below so far
RewriteRule ^(.*)(\/\myownpages\/)(.*)(\?)?(.+)?$ $1/test.aspx [NC]
I am not very familiar with these rewrite rules, but maybe I can help with the regex. As I read it, you want to match any string ending with "/myownpages", "/myownpages/", or "/myownpages/?anything" and capture the part before that.
I'd use
^(.*)/myownpages(/([?].+)?)?$
to get this. See it in action at RegExr. If you need to escape the forward slashes, it becomes.
^(.*)\/myownpages(\/([?].+)?)?$
Note that this will not preserve the values in the query string; it will rewrite www.test.com/myownpages/?value1=test2&value2=test2 to www.test.com/test.aspx.
In case you want rewrite (NOT redirect) from /myownpages --> /myownpages/test.aspx, try using:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule myownpages/?$ /myownpages/test.aspx [NC,QSA,L]
QSA-flag appends the query string to the source path automatically.
Right now I'm doing something like this:
RewriteRule ^/?logout(/)?$ logout.php
RewriteRule ^/?config(/)?$ config.php
I would much rather have one rules that would do the same thing for each url, so I don't have to keep adding them every time I add a new file.
Also, I like to match things like '/config/new' to 'config_new.php' if that is possible. I am guessing some regexp would let me accomplish this?
Try:
RewriteRule ^/?(\w+)/?$ $1.php
the $1 is the content of the first captured string in brackets. The brackets around the 2nd slash are not needed.
edit: For the other match, try this:
RewriteRule ^/?(\w+)/(\w+)/?$ $1_$2.php
I would do something like this:
RewriteRule ^/?(logout|config|foo)/?$ $1.php
RewriteRule ^/?(logout|config|foo)/(new|edit|delete)$ $1_$2.php
I prefer to explicitly list the url's I want to match, so that I don't have to worry about static content or adding new things later that don't need to be rewritten to php files.
The above is ok if all sub url's are valid for all root url's (book/new, movie/new, user/new), but not so good if you want to have different sub url's depending on root action (logout/new doesn't make much sense). You can handle that either with a more complex regex, or by routing everything to a single php file which will determine what files to include and display based on the url.
Mod rewrite can't do (potentially) boundless replaces like you want to do in the second part of your question. But check out the External Rewriting Engine at the bottom of the Apache URL Rewriting Guide:
External Rewriting Engine
Description:
A FAQ: How can we solve the FOO/BAR/QUUX/etc. problem? There seems no solution by the use of mod_rewrite...
Solution:
Use an external RewriteMap, i.e. a program which acts like a RewriteMap. It is run once on startup of Apache receives the requested URLs on STDIN and has to put the resulting (usually rewritten) URL on STDOUT (same order!).
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap quux-map prg:/path/to/map.quux.pl
RewriteRule ^/~quux/(.*)$ /~quux/${quux-map:$1}
#!/path/to/perl
# disable buffered I/O which would lead
# to deadloops for the Apache server
$| = 1;
# read URLs one per line from stdin and
# generate substitution URL on stdout
while (<>) {
s|^foo/|bar/|;
print $_;
}
This is a demonstration-only example and just rewrites all URLs /~quux/foo/... to /~quux/bar/.... Actually you can program whatever you like. But notice that while such maps can be used also by an average user, only the system administrator can define it.