Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS

[JaredMumford]

Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs.

Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?

[Amsplash]

I have 1 or two suggestions. Could you provide an example of the URL? This will allow me to give a more definiive  solution

[JaredMumford]

Hi Merlin  - thank you.

Here is an example:

www.domain-name.com/category1/subcategory/product-name-details-(model-number)-length

needs to change to:

www.domain-name.com/category1/subcategory/product-name-details-model-number-length

Any suggestion would be great. Their programmer is having trouble creating a rule.

Thanks in advance

[Amsplash]

Ok,

having looked at the site I would recommend that the changes are done via server side. I assume the htaccess file is been used to to parse category/subcategory/productname to a controller. Within that controller if the product is found clean the product name with the function below test it against the given url and do a 301 redirect to the cleaned name if they do not match

function clean_name($string) {    $non_acceptable = '#[^-a-zA-Z0-9 ]#';    $string = preg_replace($non_acceptable, '', $string);    $string = trim($string);     $string = preg_replace('#[-_ ]+#', '-', $string);     return $string;  }

[JaredMumford]

thanks Merlin - Ill have their programmer try this.

[JaredMumford]

I thought I'd come back and re-post the solution in case this shows up in SERPs or anyone other Moz members are looking for this answer (courtesy Noah Wooden of Izoox). HTACCESS:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On

# Strip set of opening-closing parenthesis from URL and 301 redirect.
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [()]+
    RewriteRule ^(.)[(]+([^)])[)]+(.*)$ /$1$2$3 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

Remember to put this in the proper 'order' on your htaccess file if you are doing any other redirecting. The code above 301 redirects URLs with parentheses into the exact same URL minus the parentheses.