Answered htaccess rewrite regex help

Hi,

Having some issue with a rewrite rule. Trying to do the following redirect:

If the following url is used:
/news/latestnews/some-article-2012.html
the user is redirected to
/news/2012/some-article-2012.html
if they enter
/news/latestnews/some-article-2013.html
the get redirect to
/news/2013/some-article-2013.html

So depending what the year is in the file name they are redirected to the corresponding year directory. Note that the year isn't always the last 4 characters before the .html.

I have it redirecting to the correct year directory, but i can't append the correct file name.
What i've got is (this just catches the 2012 ones):


But his just redirects to
/news/2012
not
/news/2012/some-article-2012.html

I've tried adding $1 to the end of the rewriterule like this:

But this appending the whole of the original url and not just the file name. so i end up getting
/news/2012/news/latestnews/some-article-2012.html

I'm close, but just need some fine tuning i think on the regex part.

Any suggestions?

Quote from: BobRay at Jul 11, 2013, 03:16 PM

I think you want something like this. It should handle any year after 2010

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/news/latestnews/(.*)$

RewriteRule /news/latestnews/(.*)(201[0-9])(.*) /news/$2/$1$2$3 [R=301,L]

Great thanks Bob, even better solution than as I was expecting to do one for each year. Needed to tweak the RewriteRule ever so slightly as it wasn't working. I've added ^ to the start and removed the first /. Also added $ to the end of the pattern. So it looks like.


Not sure why the first / was causing problems.

But thanks again Bob, a great solution. Do you want to edit your answer to include the tweaks so I can flag it as the correct answer as doesn't feel right flagging my own after you've done all the hard work

I'm not sure why those changes are necessary either. I tested it with preg_match in PHP, but I think .htaccess rewrite rules are not quite the same. I've modified the post above.