Question

I need to redirect some urls.

Formerly I had

http://mysite.com/foobar/?section_id=1234

These are no pointing to

http://mysite.com/foobar/1234

I put the following in my code to handle attempts to visit the old url:

$section_id = filter_input(INPUT_GET, 'section_id', FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);

if ( $section_id ) {
    header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
    header( "Location: ".$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]."/foobar/".$section_id );
}

The problem is that after redirecting the url is:

http://mysite.com/foobar

The needed id is not there!

In that if statement if I do

echo "Location: ".$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]."/foobar/".$section_id;

I get:

http://mysite.com/foobar/1234

but then the redirect still fails to include the 1234 part.

Why is this and how to I get it to redirect as desired?

---

Output of lynx -head -dump http://mysite.com/foobar/1234 (i.e. it looks correct to me)

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:55:09 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=c35123456; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
X-Pingback: http://mysite.com/xmlrpc.php
Link: <http://wp.me/mysite>; rel=shortlink
Location: mysite.com/foobar/1234
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Answer 1

The Location header must have an absolute and valid URL as its value. I.e. must begin with http://.

Edit: The Location header value can also be an absolute path starting with a forward slash /.