htaccess redirect scenerio question.

[sampleman7]

Hello :)
Ive seen a lot of websites use this technique, and I'm assuming they use htaccess to accomplish it, I'm just clueless of proper syntax. Here's the scenerio...

User types...
"http://yourdomain.com/anyword"
htaccess would redirect to...
"http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi?parameter=anyword"

Is this a redirect or a rewrite, and what's the syntax?

Help is greatly appreciated!
(Newby at this forum!)
Dennis

[httpman]

Hello sampleman7

You could find answers there :
http://www.webdeveloper.com/servers/...ess_magic.html

or better yet, there :
http://wsabstract.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

JP

[paulhiles]

Hi Dennis,

Looks like a redirect to me. A redirect instruction in a .htaccess file has three elements. The redirect command itself, the file or directory you want to redirect, and finally the full URL of the destination file or folder. Note: each element is separated by a single space.

So, using the scenario you describe above, I would say the .htaccess file should contain the following:

Redirect /anyword http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/script...ameter=anyword

Hope that helps!

Paul

[sampleman7]

ok, really "my bad" here, that I didn't explain this properly....

"anyword" is input by the user, and is not solidly defined. It literally would be "any word". I want the user's input to be added to the redirect. What I'm accomplishing is letting viewers of my site to view a member's profile by just entering a screenname after the domain...

"http://mydonain.com/anyusername"

anyusername can be anyone's user name, and is added to the actual script command...

"http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?username=anyusername"

So, in other words, I want to capture whatever the user types in place of "anyusername" copy it, and place it at the end of the redirect.

I have even contacted a couple websites to see how they are accomplishing this, but nobody has responded. It's like a trade secret.

Thanks guys for your time, I really do appreciate it!
Dennis :)

[sampleman7]

RewriteRule ^_([^/]+)/?$ cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=viewprofile&username=$1 [R]

With this, I have to tell my users to place an underscore before the name, so that it separates just a single word, and a file with an extention, or any other reference that could conflict!

Take away the underscore in the rule, and any word would apply to the redirect. Great for people that don't have any other files to point to other than their script!

Yay!