Today I ran into an issue which I could not figure out for quite a while. I was trying to redirect a url to another url using RewriteRule. It was supposed to be a pretty straightforward redirect which made it even more annoying than complicated ones. Hopefully somebody is able to explain what I am missing here and if my solution is a good solution or not.
I needed to redirect a url:Â http://www.example.com/testpage.php?foo=bar to http://www.example.com/
So I added this to .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^testpage\.php / [R=301,L]
This did do a 301 redirect as I wanted but query string passed so my redirected url looked like:Â http://www.example.com/?foo=bar
Obviously this is not what I wanted so in order for me to fix it, I had to take a rather lame approach. My new redirect is:
RewriteRule ^testpage\.php /? [R=301,L]
The only difference is the “?” after / for target url. I am just curious to know why query-string was passed. I have not used rewrites for long time but I do not remember this behavior.
For starters, you are using mod_rewrite where it is not needed. In this case, I would use the RedirectMatch directive.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectmatch
mod_rewrite is quite heavy and you should avoid it when there are better, lighter weight directives to be used.
You are right Brian. I should’ve used this. I wonder if I would have the same problem.
Thanks.
you’re doing the right thing (apart from using RedirectMatch, as Brian wrote) with the ‘?’.
So its supposed to pass the querystring per default, if no ‘?’ is given.
That information is somehow hidden in the documentation:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
I copied that part out of there:
Note: Query String
The Pattern will not be matched against the query string. Instead, you must use a RewriteCond with the %{QUERY_STRING} variable. You can, however, create URLs in the substitution string, containing a query string part. Simply use a question mark inside the substitution string, to indicate that the following text should be re-injected into the query string. When you want to erase an existing query string, end the substitution string with just a question mark. To combine a new query string with an old one, use the [QSA] flag.
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