Question

I successfully changed my URLs from ugly ones with several parameters in the querystring to clean looking ones with the help of mod rewrite. However, there are many url’s for my site. Rather than go back and edit the href attribute on each and every one of my anchor tags, I tried to write a redirect function in the .htaccess file that automatically redirects the old url to the new one.

In my .htaccess file, I have the following:

RewriteEngine On

Redirect teams.php?league=$1&team=$2&year=$3&tab=$4 teams/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(css|js|img)/
RewriteRule ^teams/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)$ teams.php?league=$1&team=$2&year=$3&tab=$4 [L]

No luck though… any thoughts?

Thanks

Answer 1

You need to do a check that the old URL with the php in it is actually being requested by matching against %{THE_REQUEST}, otherwise it’ll redirect loop forever (e.g. user goes to team.php, serve redirects to teams, browser requests teams, server rewrites as teams.php, server sees “teams.php” and redirects to teams, browser requests teams, server rewrites as teams.php, etc. etc.)

RewriteEngine On

# redirect when the user actually requests for teams.php
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /teams\.php\?league=([^&]+)&team=([^&]+)&year=([^&]+)&tab=([^\ ]+)
RewriteRule ^teams\.php$ /teams/%1/%2/%3/%4? [R=301,L]

# internally rewrite any /teams/ URI
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(css|js|img)/
RewriteRule ^teams/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)$ teams.php?league=$1&team=$2&year=$3&tab=$4 [L]