[vox-tech] Question related to Apache mod_rewrite and regular expressions

[David Spencer, Internet Handyman]

Harold, that worked perfectly! Thanks so much!!

In looking at the results, I was wondering if it's possible to "hide"
the resulting URL for SEO purposes? In other words, when the link is
to product-Another-Thing.php, the URL changes internally to
product.php?name=Another-Thing but it doesn't update in the location
string. I've slogged about with it this morning, but as usual, all
I've managed to do is break it. Any further ideas?

Thanks again,


-- Dave Spencer, PageWeavers

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 3:36 PM, David Spencer <spencer at pageweavers.com>wrote:

> I've killed the better part of the morning and this afternon trying to
> figure out this use of Apache's mod_rewrite.


Welcome to mod_rewrite. There's a logging facility that can create a log of
which rules were tried, but it doesn't help in this case where you only have
one rule.


> RewriteEngine On
> RewriteRule ^/?product-([A-Za-z0-9-]+)\.php$ product.php?name=$1 [ R=301,L]
>

You did a gread job here, but ...

1) No spaces in the [] at the end of the line, so you want [R=301,L]

2) I found I needed to add this option also:
Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

3) You almost certainly also want QSA (query string append), making it
[R=301,L,QSA] at the end of the line. This will add the name parameter to
whatever other parameters were sent, instead of dropping the original
parameters:

    product-a.php?quantity=4 -> product.php?name=a&quantity=4

You can check Apache's error_log if this still isn't working for hints.

Harold