[SOLVED] Apache .htaccess redirection '?' (question mark character) using regex

angel115 · 10-28-2009, 05:23 AM

Hello There,

After checking the apache doc and several forums on the subject I still didn't manage to redirect the character '?'

Ex 1: The following is working fine:

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$
RewriteRule ^index.html\/dll\/c\/(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.mydomain\.com\/index\.php\/$1" [R=301,L]

in this case the URL: http://www.mysite.com/index.html?fra...p/f/myfile.zip will be redirected
to: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?download=myfile.zip

Ex 2: The following doesn't

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$
RewriteRule ^index.html\?frameA\=zip\/c\/(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.mydomain\.com\/index\.php\?letter\=$1" [R=301,L]

In this case if I type the URL: http://mydomain.com/index.html?frameA=zip/c/myfile nothing happen. It's like if my string didn't match (but it does)

and each time is the same, all my redirections are working fine except the one with a question mark.

Any idea why?

SethsdadtheLinuxer · 10-28-2009, 09:31 AM

try using the the generic . instead of \?

angel115 · 11-05-2009, 03:37 AM

Hi SethsdadtheLinuxer

Thanks for you reply but that doesn't work.

After few more hours I finaly found the solution

and here it is:

Code:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^frameA\=zip\/[a-z]\/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^index\.html(.*)$  /index.php?search=%1  [L]

I explain

Here is how my original URL look like:
http://www.mysite.com/index.html?fra...p/f/myfile.zip

and I wanted it to become:
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?download=myfile.zip

So when you have a ? in your Original URL you need to use %{QUERY_STRING} in RewriteCond to check if it match what you are expecting and to gather the elements that you want with "()"

In my example I was interested to know which file the visitor was trying to access and keep it for later to be able to rebuild the new URL. In my example it was "myfile.zip"

Now the problem I've got was "how to use my pattern in memory and past it into my new url?". I was trying to access with the dollar sign "$" as I though it should be (like in normal Regex) but no, you need to to use the "%" sign to use the pattern stored in memory from the previous line the $ sign will return the pattern sored in memory from the same line.
Ex:

Code:

RewriteRule ^(index)\.html$  /($1).php  [L]

in the above example the $1 will hold the value 'index'.

so I use %1 and here it is, it retrieved the value put in memory the line just above.

Well I'm not sure if I was clear in my explaination but I hope that will help few people out there, as this one give me few good hours of testing before to get the expected result.

enjoy

Angel.