htaccess RewriteRule page with query string

Question

I have a set of pages that I'm trying to redirect to new URLs. They have different query strings in the target URL than in the original URL.

http://localhost/people.php?who=a

should redirect to:

http://localhost/people/?t=leadership

And on and on...

I have the following set of rewrite rules and am obviously doing something very wrong.

RewriteRule ^people.php?who=a /people/?t=leadership [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^people.php?who=f /people/?t=faculty [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^people.php?who=p /people/?t=students [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^people.php?who=r /people/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^people.php /people/ [R=301,L]

What's happening is that the first 4 rules don't match and the page redirects to:

http://localhost/people/?who=a

I have tried the QSD flag, but it seems like my problem is that the rule isn't matching on the entire query string, not that it's passing the query string along.

Solution 1

You need to match against the %{QUERY_STRING} variable. The query string isn't part of the match in a RewriteRule:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^who=a$
RewriteRule ^people.php$ /people/?t=leadership [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^who=f$
RewriteRule ^people.php$ /people/?t=faculty [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^who=p$
RewriteRule ^people.php$ /people/?t=students [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^who=r$
RewriteRule ^people.php$ /people/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^people.php$ /people/ [R=301,L]

Solution 2

You cannot match QUERY_STRING in RewruteRule URI pattern:

Try your rules like this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+people\.php\?who=a\s [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /people/?t=leadership [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+people\.php\?who=f\s [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /people/?t=faculty [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+people\.php\?who=p\s [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /people/?t=students [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/+people\.php(\?who=r)?\s [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /people/? [R=301,L]

Comments

[isabisa]

Awesome. I knew it was something extremely basic I was missing. Is the last RewriteCond necessary since there is no query string? Also, it looks like there are some typos in the RewriteRules where you left out the ? before the $ and left a stray f on line 4. I tried to edit, but it was fewer than 6 characters, so stackoverflow wouldn't let me.

[Jon Lin]

@isabisa The last condition is just a precaution, if there's no query string, then it'll match ^$, which is blank. I removed the typos.

[WoodrowShigeru]

Note that ^who=a$ with "sentence" end and beginning markers will only match ?who=a – neither ?other=e&who=a nor ?who=a&other=e.