How to form redirect or rewrite where query string contains portion I want to extract to new query string

Question

I've transferred an old custom-made site to Mediawiki and I have many internal and external links to my old pages that I want to redirect to the appropriate wiki page.

There are many links to the old site of the form:

https://www.example.com/?productOrPublisher=XXXXXX

with the wiki, the relevant page would be

https://www.example.com/index.php?title=XXXXXX

With all the attempts below, the URL remains as https://www.example.com/?productOrPublisher=XXXXXX and the front page of the site always renders.

I've tried

RedirectMatch 301 "^\?productOrPublisher=(.*?)$" "https://www.example.com/index.php?title=$1"

and

RewriteRule ^\?productOrPublisher=(.*) https://www.example/index.php?title=$1 [L,R=permanent]

but these don't work. I'm not surprised, because I think I have to be extracting from
%{QUERY_STRING} somehow, but I don't know how.

I tried to adapt information from the 'Rewrite query string' section of https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/remapping.html for example this:

(.*(?:^|&))?productOrPublisher=(.*?)$

replacing with

index.php?title=$2

I tested this in notepad++ and there I can't get rid of the ? after the / so I get https://www.example.com/?index.php?title=FreeMind and I tried it in .htaccess but it leaves the URL unchanged.

There are many other redirects in .htaccess and have placed these attempts near the top after RewriteEngine On and RewriteBase / to try to pre-empt others.

Answer 1

I think I have to be extracting from %{QUERY_STRING} somehow

Yes, you need to use mod_rewrite and check against the QUERY_STRING server variable in a RewriteCond (condition) directive.

And yes, these will need to go near the top of your .htaccess file (without seeing your existing .htaccess) to be sure there are no conflicts.

Try something like the following instead:

(I've assumed you are using Apache 2.4, as opposed to 2.2)

RewrietCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^productOrPublisher=([^&]+)
RewriteRule ^$ /index.php?title=%1 [R=302,L]

This matches a URL of the form /?productOrPublisher=XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is variable) and redirects to /index.php?title=XXXXXX.

It won't match if there is a URL-path, or if there are any other URL parameters before this in the query string.

%1 is backreference to the last matched group in the preceding CondPattern.

This is also a 302 (temporary) redirect. Only change it to a 301 (permanent) redirect when you are sure it's working OK, since 301s are cached aggressively by the browser and so can make testing problematic.