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Asked: 2026-05-26T01:00:22+00:00

I wrote a regex for a rewrite rule that includes a negative lookahead to

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I wrote a regex for a rewrite rule that includes a negative lookahead to replace the rewriteCond line, because WordPress only accepts two values: pattern -> substitution.

It should find findme.html _here, regardless of where it’s requested to be:
mydomain.com/_here/findme.html
e.g.

(Sorry, I can’t modify the swf which will request findme.html in the wrong places)

So, given findme.html could be requested to be in, e.g.:

mydomain.com/findme.html
mydomain.com/directory/findme.html
mydomain.com/directory/findme.html?someparam=3

The rewrite should make them all

mydomain.com/_here/findme.html

So, I made a rewrite rule that WordPress will accept me as follow

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*(?!_here)/*findme\.html$ /_here/findme.html [R=301,L]

So it only matches URLs which doesn’t contain “_here” in it, to prevent extra rewriting or a loop.

The problem is IT DOES loop.

What did I miss?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It looks to me like you want to move the .* that is before (?!_here) to after it because (?!_here) is a negative lookahead, so it check that the text _here does not come after it. What your regular expression is actually checking is whether your url starts with some character sequence that is not followed by _here, and _here is a character sequence not followed by _here. Then your rule becomes

    RewriteRule ^(?!_here).*/*findme\.html$ /_here/findme.html [R=301,L]

    Also, it looks like your pattern will exclude paths with subdirectories such as 

    mydomain.com/directory/subdirectory/findme.html

    If you also want to include those, the pattern should be

    RewriteRule ^(?!_here)(.*/)*findme\.html$ /_here/findme.html [R=301,L]
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