301 redirect rule

[iQandil]

Hi there,

I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example:

http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/?

I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be:

http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/

Any help is most appreciated.

Thanks
Issa

[donford]

This should work..

Test it out and see if we're on the right track.

RewriteEngine on
RedirectMatch 301 ^page.html?.$ http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
RedirectMatch 301 ^/another-directory?.$ http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/yet-another-directory/?.*$ http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/

[MichaelC-15022]

Donford's answer looks right to me, but I'd test it on your particular server as well.

My experience with .htaccess is that the various test tools don't always perform exactly the same as the server itself; also different webserver software (even different versions of Apache!) seem to have different results for the same patterns.

So...it's not always even sufficient to test on your development server.

[iQandil]

Not sure how the status of this question has changed to "Answered" but no thats not the right answer I'm afraid. What I was asking for is a wildcard redirect not redirect for the three examples i provided.

As mentioned i have hundreds of pages that require this change.

Issa

[donford]

the .*$ is the wildcard you can redirect on match keyword or directory.

Here is a good site that helps with this, special note the "Wildcard Redirect" section.

The question mark is usually an indication that the urls are dynamic if that is the case you may also want to review this helpful post on seOverflow.com about dynamic urls.

[MichaelC-15022]

Donford's correct.  The "." matches any character; the "*" says 0 or more times; the $ means end of line.

[iQandil]

Hi again,

Thank you for all this so far, however, it still doesn't help me very much. If i will need to follow the same system I will need to create a redirect line for each directory level and variation level I have on the website. Please not that in my initial question i said I have hundreds of cases of this issue.

I have discussed this issue with friends who came up with a solution that I thought i should share with you guys here. The redirect code should be:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|HEAD|POST)\ /[^\ ?]*?($|\ )

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [L,R=301]

The first line ensures that the rule will only deal with question marks that appears at the end of the URL not the middle (as you kindly mentioned before). The second line then removes the question mark.

Plus, its just 2 lines, 1 rule which is a much shorter format

I hope this will be useful to someone else, it surely has saved me a lot of trouble, its now implemented and works perfectly.

Issa

[MichaelC-15022]

Hmmmm...you shouldn't need the RewriteCond. The regex for the rule itself merely needs to end in ?$, indicating that the ? must be the last character on the line.

And your rule looks to me like it will APPEND a question mark, not remove it!

I haven't tested this, but this should work as a blanket rule for all files and folders:

RewriteRule ^(.*)?$ /$1 [L,R=301]