Question

I have a site that functions using a “language” URI attribute to set language

oursite.com/home?language=en

We need to be able to also use SEO friendly 2 character URI preppenders

oursite.com/en/home

I’m currently doing a redirect to the index.php file in .htaccess with a few exceptions so my .htaccess has these 2 lines for rewrites

RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2}|[a-z]{2}-[A-Z]{2})/(.*)? ?$2/language=$1
RewriteRule !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml|robots\.txt) /index.php?/$1  

I need to do a logical rewrite to end up with

/index.php?/home?language=en

What would be the correct Rewrite rule set to make this happen? Is it really even possible?

Answer 1

The RewriteRule !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml|robots\.txt) /index.php?/$1 line isn’t going to work because you can’t create a backreference to a negative match.

Also, a request like: /index.php?/home?language=en is kind of ambiguous, the ? is reserved and needs to be encoded in the query string, otherwise, it can be appended (so that ? becomes a &). Try something like:

RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2}|[a-z]{2}-[A-Z]{2})/(.*)? /$2?language=$1 [L]
RewriteRule !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml|robots\.txt) /index.php?%{REQUEST_URI} [L,QSA]

This takes: http://oursite.com/en/home and rewrites it internally to the URI /index.php?/home&language=en. But if you literally want an encoded ? in the query string then change the second rule to:

RewriteRule !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml|robots\.txt) /index.php?%{REQUEST_URI}\%3F%{QUERY_STRING} [L,NE]