.htaccess - delete characters from URL and redirect

Question

I need help modify a file .htaccess delete characters from URL and redirect. The file .htaccess is currently empty.

1. I want to change the word article to the word topic in all the URLs.

The current URL:

www.example.com/index.php?action=article&cat_id=011&id=37&lang=en

1. I want to delete the last characters of the URLs &lang=en and some URLs &lang=

The current URLs:

www.example.com/index.php?action=article&cat_id=011&id=37&lang=en
www.example.com/?action=article&cat_id=011&id=37&lang=

So the final URL:

www.example.com/index.php?action=topic&cat_id=011&id=37
www.example.com/?action=topic&cat_id=011&id=37

Answer 1

With the following code:

• Line 1: Just a block header comment to explain what happens in the code snippet
• Line 2: Requires a parameter match of the action=article value pair;
• Line 3: Captures the cat_id value into parameter %2.
• Line 4: Captures the id value into parameter %5.
• Line 5: Could be used to capture the lang value (commented out / not in use).
• Line 6: Rewrites internally to a hard-coded URL with parameters specified.

If you wished to use the lang value at some point in the future you would simply need to append &lang=%8 to the end of line 6 and remove the # comment prefix from line 5.

# Change action parameter value from article to topic and drop lang parameter
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} action=article
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*&)?cat_id=([^&]+)&?(.*)?$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*&)?id=([^&]+)&?(.*)?$
#RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*&)?lang=([^&]+)&?(.*)?$
RewriteRule ^index\.php(.*)$ index.php?action=topic&cat_id=%2&id=%5