Question

For some reason this is not working…

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

Redirect 301 "/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=179" http://www.mysite.com/a/new/url

I have no idea why… If I replace the URL being redirected with another non-existent one (/helloworld) it redirects fine to the new url..

Is it catching on something? I tried escaping (/modules.php\?name=News&file=article&sid=179) but it didn’t make any difference, still just 404s.

any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

You can’t match against the query string in the Redirect directive, you’ll have to use mod_rewrite and the %{QUERY_STRING} variable. Try this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} name=News&file=article&sid=179
RewriteRule ^/?modules\.php$ http://www.mysite.com/a/new/url? [R=301,L]
# There is a ? here to prevent query strings appending -----^