Redirection Plugin and Regular Expressions

[dreadmichael]

I am using Wordpress and the Redirection plugin.

I have recently launched a new site and while it was in development, a lot of broken pages were created and indexed. These are terminating in 404s.

I am looking to redirect all traffic from: /replay/postname/ to the homepage. When I use this regular expression:

Source: /replay/*

Target: /

it removes the /replay/ but leaves the postname.

Any idea how I could redirect all traffic inside of /replay/ to the homepage?

Thanks a bunch, Josh

[AdoptionHelp]

In regular expressions the / character denotes the end and beginning. Try this instead:

source: /replay/(.)*

target: /

The source can be parsed as "start at replay, escape a / into the string, then any other characters or none at all."

[dreadmichael]

That did it! Thanks!

Do you mind explaining that syntax for me?

[AdoptionHelp]

A bit more detail:

/ begins the regular expression - from here on we're replacing what evaluates as TRUE

replay looks for the string "replay" in the URL

\ is an escape character, meaning evaluate what follows as is. We need to escape because / has a specific meaning in regex, but we want it to actually look for a slash

/ follows the escape character, so now its searching for "replay/"

. means any character other than line-break

• means this part is present 0, 1 or many times. You want "anything after replay/" so we repeat the . regex with a ... arriving at (.)  The parenthesis tell the * which part its supposed to work on

[dreadmichael]

wow, fantastic. Very helpful - really appreciate it!