htaccess Redirect URL with GET Parameters

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I have a URL that is in the format http://www.example.com/?s=query

I want to redirect this URL to http://www.example.com/search/query

I have the following .htaccess but I wanted to check if there is anything wrong with this. My RewriteRule looks a little wonky and I don't know if it will cause problems for other URLs.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /search/%1? [NC,L,R]

I ran a test Here and it seems to redirect to the correct URL.

url-rewriting .htaccess mod-rewrite apache
1 Answers
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /search/%1? [NC,L,R]

You will likely need the NE (noescape) flag on the RewriteRule directive if you are receiving a %-encoded URL parameter value, otherwise the target URL will be doubly-encoded. The QUERY_STRING server variable is not decoded by Apache.

It also depends on how you are rewriting /search/query back to /?s=query (or presumably more like /index.php?s=query?) - presumably you are already doing this later in the config? You only want this redirect to apply to direct requests and not rewritten requests (otherwise you'll get a redirect loop). An easy way to ensure this is to check that the REDIRECT_STATUS env var is empty.

For example:

RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /search/%1 [NE,QSD,R,L]

Other points:

  • The QSD flag would be preferable (on Apache 2.4) to appending ? to the end of the susbtitution string in order to remove the query string.
  • The regex ^s=(.*) (the trailing $ was superfluous) does assume that s is the only URL parameter at the start of the query string. As it stands, everything is assumed to be part of this value. eg. s=foo&bar=1 will result in /search/foo&bar=1.
  • The NC flag on the RewriteRule directive is superfluous.
  • Should you also be checking for /index.php?s=<query>? (Or whatever file/DirectoryIndex is handling the request.)
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