Hi,

I'm pretty new to regex and still trying to figure out how to do simple things.

Can anyone explain to me why this redirect works in my .htaccess file (I'm on Apache):

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.htmlRD\=123$ test22.php?q=$1 [L]
when I use the url http://www.mydomain.com/blah.htmlRD=123

but this redirect gives me a 404 error blah.html not found:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.html\?RD\=123$ test22.php?q=$1 [L]
when I use the url http://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?RD=123

I thought I can use a question mark as a literal if I escape it with \ so I don't understand why the second example doesn't work.

Thanks.

susb8383:

...
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.htmlRD\=123$ test22.php?q=$1 [L]
...

I thought I can use a question mark as a literal if I escape it with \ so I don't understand why the second example doesn't work.

[EDIT: I missed the point entirely in my original response - but I don't seem to be able to delete this comment]

Susan

 

I don't see your original response.

Aha, I got my answer.

Query strings in url redirects are special cases.

So now this is what I have and it works:
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.html$ test22.php?q=$1 [QSA,L]

The QSA flag tells it to send through whatever query string it had originally so the end result is that when I put this into the browser:
http://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?RD=123

It redirects to this:
http://www.mydomain.com/test22.php?q=blah&RD=123