: Need expert help with tricky redirect problem I actually posted about this years ago, never got anywhere. Did more research, did testing, got something I thought worked and mostly did, but it

@Vandalay111

Posted in: #ModRewrite #UrlRewriting

I actually posted about this years ago, never got anywhere. Did more research, did testing, got something I thought worked and mostly did, but it seems to get bogged down in infinite loops under certain circumstances. I am at my wit's end. Anyone who can help me resolve this, you are my hero for life. :)

The Problem

I run a photo gallery and I changed my website structure a few years ago.

The Old Site

The old structure, an album had a form like this:
desktopscenes.com/Name Of Album (Year)/default.html


Individual photo slides were like this:
desktopscenes.com/Name Of Album (Year)/slides/Name Of Slide.html


And the actual slide was:
desktopscenes.com/Name Of Album (Year)/slides/Name Of Slide.jpg


The New Site

An album is like this:
desktopscenes.com/Name_Of_Album_-_Year/index.htm

A photo slide like this:
desktopscenes.com/Name_Of_Album_-_Year/slides/Name_Of_Slide.htm

And the photo:
desktopscenes.com/Name_Of_Album_-_Year/slides/Name_Of_Slide.jpg

So What I Need to Happen Is:


Change all spaces to underscores.
Change the year references from " (Year)" to "_-_Year".
Change "html" to "htm".
Not break anything else. :)


My Attempt

You'd think this would be fairly simple. And in fact I actually got this to work -- most of the time. The problem is that occasionally something sends a request and sends it into an infinite loop.

Here's my code.

RewriteEngine On
Rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(desktopscenes.com desktopscenes.com)$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)s(.*)$ _ [N,NE]
RewriteRule ^(.*)((.*)$ -_ [N,NE]
RewriteRule ^(.*))(.*)html$ desktopscenes.com/htm [NE,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*))(.*)jpg$ desktopscenes.com/jpg [NE,R=301,L]


A Clue - Revised!

If 'proper' requests come in as they should, this works fine. I think the problem is if a request comes in that is incorrect. In particular, sometimes I get a request like this on the old site:
desktopscenes.com/Name Of Album (Year)/Name Of Slide.jpg


Notice the "slides" folder is missing. I am pretty sure this request created an infinite loop.

ETA: Looking through my logs I am now seeing this is much more common than I thought. I would love a way, if possible, to add the "slides/" folder back in if a request for a .jpg comes in without "slides/" in the URI.

In Closing

Thank you for listening and attempting to help me with this. It has literally been bothering me for years!

Addendum

I have also been changing apostrophes in the original names to dashes. But these are infrequent so they are less important.

Revised Code

This is what I have now

RewriteEngine On
Rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(desktopscenes.com desktopscenes.com)$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(Test.*)s(.*)$ _ [N,NE]
RewriteRule ^(Test.*)((.*)$ -_ [N,NE]
RewriteRule ^(Test.*))(.*)/slides/(.*)html$ desktopscenes.com//slides/htm [NE,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(Test.*))(.*)/slides/(.*)jpg$ desktopscenes.com//slides/jpg [NE,R=301,L]


This handles the case where I have album (year)/subalbum/slides.html or whatnot.

The "Test" is in there so I can test this on a dummy structure without blowing up the rest of the site.

I am still not sure how to handle requests of the form:
desktopscenes.com/Name Of Album (Year)/Name Of Slide.jpb

That is no "slides". I am not sure what the regex is to NOT find a particular string, I guess I could look that up.

Another Update - Adding back "/slides/"

I don't need to search for "no slides". Since the ones that match "slides" have the "L" suffix they should stop processing once found. (Correct?)

So I was able to add this:

RewriteRule ^(Test.*))([^/]*)/(.*)jpg$ desktopscenes.com//slides/jpg [NE,R=301,L]


Which actually adds the "/slides" back in if not present on a JPG request, which is great!

When I tried to do the same for HTML however:

RewriteRule ^(Test.*))([^/]*)/(.*)html$ desktopscenes.com//slides/htm [NE,R=301,L]


It doesn't work. Any idea why?

Vote Up Vote Down

Login to post a comment!