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RSSUse regular expressions in .htaccess for redirections
Task one:
Apache server provides a .htaccess file using which you can use to redirect URLs. For example, if you want to redirect all visitors to http://dallascao.com/cn/ to http://dallascao.com/en/, you can open the .htaccess file at the root, and then input:
RewriteRule ^cn\/?$ en\/
Translating the code in English, it means “Please replace ‘^cn\/?$’ with ‘en/’”. “^cn\/?$” is a regular expression, in which:
“^” matches the beginning of a string.
“$” matches the end.
“\” means “/” following it stands for “/” itself, not part of the grammar.
“?” means there can be one “/” or no “/”
So “^cn\/?$” matches two strings: “cn/” or “cn”. When visitors visit http://dallascao.com/cn/ (end with a slash) or http://dallascao.com/cn (end with no slash), they are redirected to http://dallascao.com/en/
Task two:
If you want to redirect all visitors to the root of http://dallascao.com/ to http://dallascao.com/en/, I can use this:
RewriteRule ^$ en\/
“^$” matches an empty string, meaning the root.
Task three:
Inputting the following code into the .htaccess of http://gt4t.net/, all visitors to http://gt4t.net/anything/ to http://gt4t.net/en/anything/. For example, visitors to http://gt4t.net/downloads/ will be redirected to http://gt4t.net/en/downloads.
RewriteRule ^(.*?)\/?$ \/en\/$1
“^(.*?)\/?$” means anything that either ends with one “/” or no “/”. In the second part, “\/en\/$1″, “$1″ stands for the 1st bracketed element in the previous string “^(.*?)\/?$” (in this case, the only bracketed element.). And it means replacing “ANYTHING” ending with “/” or no “/” with “/en/ANYTHING/”
By the way, if you want your redirection to be hidden, you can add the following option to the beginng .
Options +FollowSymLinksIn the example above, your visitors to http://gt4t.net/downloads is redirected to http://gt4t.net/gt4t_en/downloads/ but http://gt4t.net/downloads is still shown in the address bar.
Finally, here is is the complete .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^gt4t.net$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.gt4t.net$ RewriteRule ^(.*?)\/?$ \/gt4t_en\/$1 [L]
Confused? Contact me if you have such a need. I will be happy to help you.
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