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removing folder via regex in htaccess – SEO

While I’m good with many things scripting and programming, the one thing I never really got into is regex.

I’m tweaking a third party script that uses the url structure of site.com/username/p/seo-friendly-link. I want it to be site.com/username/seo-friendly-link instead

its .htaccess file has

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/p/(.*)$ ./dir/pages/post.php?user=$1&pid=$2
RewriteRule ^p/(.*)$ ./dir/pages/post.php?pid=$1

when I remove /p as

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/(.*)$ ./dir/pages/post.php?user=$1&pid=$2

I see it the error in the apache logs as

[error] [client ::1] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace.

I’ve tried adding the L to the end of the unmodified rule and it still gives the same error.

I want to learn regex, but I feel like this particular example isn’t that noob friendly and it’d instead led to more confusion.

can someone explain what those two lines do, how to get what I need or why it’s not as simple as it seems?

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    Change the first line to

    RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/p/(.*)$ ./dir/pages/post.php?user=$1&pid=$2 [L,NC,R]

    This makes the url redirect and asserts it is the last rule to be checked.

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  2. 0

    Not an expert in .htaccess configuration rules, but as far the regex is concerned the problem seems to be that ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/(.*)$ covers too many possible matches because of the last (.*) group which literally matches anything.

    In other words, ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/(.*)$ matches both username/p/seo-friendly-link and username/seo-friendly-link. It will also match the target part dir/pages/post.php?user=$1&pid=$2, probably leading to the infinite redirects.

    To restrict the regex, you should exclude the / from the second group. So instead of (.*), use [^/]* where [^/] defines a character class that matches any character except /:

    RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/([^/]*)$ ./dir/pages/post.php?user=$1&pid=$2
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