Question

I am writing a multi language website. Therefore I would like some help with a URL rewrite problem.

Case:

• When someone visits http://www.example.com without adding a country code (nl, en, de) the htaccess redirects the visitor to http://www.example.com/nl/ i.g.
  RewriteRule !(nl|en|de)(.*).* /nl/ [R=301,L]
• The website is renewed and has got many url’s directing to the website (google, forums). i.g. http://www.example.com/oldpage-nomore.html. What I would like is the following; the htaccess should detect that the request uri doesn’t contain nl,en or de and should redirect to pagenotfound.php. RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html /public/oldurl?section=nl&notfound=$1$2&basehref=true&%1 [PT,L] the problem with this Rewrite rule is: all files ending in .html are being redirected.

What I am looking for is the following:

• When someone visits http://www.example.com and no request uri is entered this should redirect to http://www.example.com/nl/
• When there is a requested uri and this doens’t contain a countrycode (nl|en|de) than redirect to pagenotfound.php

I tried the following but it doens’t work:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(nl|en|de)$
RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/(.*)\.html$ /pagenotfound.php?page=$2 [L,R=404]

I hope someone can help.
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Try to place this .htaccess file at the server root folder:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?$
RewriteRule ^.*$ /nl/ [R]


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(nl|en|de)
RewriteRule ^.*/(.*)\.html$ /pagenotfound.php?page=$2 [L,R=404]

(you probably made several mistakes, I tried to fix them)
I’m not sure with the first RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} regular expression – maybe remove the question mark or slash, I don’t now… can’t test now.