Question

I’ve been wrestling with this seemingly simple re-direct task for hours now and for the life of me cannot get it going.. Whether I pass in the value of 1 or 19 in url, in both cases it re-directs me to http://mywebsite.com/catalogue-gifts/chicks. (ideally, I want the second condition/rule to bring user to http://mywebsite.com/catalogue-gifts/mango-fruit-trees/)

Below is what I have:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} pID=1<br />
RewriteRule ^product_details2\.asp$ http://mywebsite.com/catalogue-gifts/chicks$1? [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} pID=19<br />
RewriteRule ^product_details2\.asp$ http://mywebsite.com/catalogue-gifts/mango-fruit-trees$1? [L,R=301]

Any help is much appreciated.. Thanks

Answer 1

This is because the RewriteCond match is a regular expression with bounds. Therefore, if you have in the query string:

pID=19

it will match pID=1, because it doesn’t check the end of the query string, pID=1 is part of pID=19.

You need to change your conditions to:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} pID=1(&|$)

and

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} pID=19(&|$)

The (&|$) at the end means after those numbers, you have either a & character (for another parameter) or the end of the string ($).

Additionally, if you are worried about other query string parameters that may end with a pID, like foopID, then you should add a boundary check to the front of those regex, like this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)pID=1(&|$)

So the (^|&) is either the beginning of the query string, or a & character.