Question

I am trying to redirect a URL with a query string to a URL without a query string, however, I would like to use values from the query string.

In my example below I am using a single state however I want it to be dynamic, meaning it will parse any URL with a query string down to a clean URL which still contains the value from the query string.

Example: http://www.mywebsite.com/?state=CA redirects to http://www.mywebsite.com/CA/

I have tired to add the information below into my HTACCESS file with no luck:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /\?state=([a-z]+)&type=([a-z\-]+)
RewriteRule ^ /%1/%2? [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /\?state=([a-z]+)($|\ )
RewriteRule ^ /%1? [L]

These have worked however I must input every redirect which I would like to avoid:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} state=FL
RewriteRule ^$ "http://www.mywebsite.com/fl/?" [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} state=RI
RewriteRule ^$ "http://www.mywebsite.com/ri/?" [R=301,L]

Any ideas? I am using WordPress on Apache. I believe everything is up to date.

Answer 1

The reason why the original rules won’t work is because it seems like your state is:

state=FL

The FL will never match the regular expression [a-z]+, because [a-z] means literally any lowercase letter, and neither F nor L are lowercase. Try:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /\?state=([a-z]+)&type=([a-z\-]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1/%2? [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /\?state=([a-z]+)($|\ ) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1? [L,R=301]

So the [NC] flag in the condition makes it so the regular expression is case insensitive.