adding html extension

[tonyward99]

Is there a way in htaccess to catch url's coming in without the html extension and send them to the right page with the extension, right now if someone does not add that at the end of the address it returns a 404 for example
/good returns 404 but
/good.html returns the page.
Basically I want to catch that and seamlessly send them to the right page.
I have searched all over and can find a way to remove it but not add it.

[chandrika]

I think it can be done in .htaccess using

<Directory /home/www/sitename/htdocs>
Options + MultiViews
</Directory>

Content Negotiation - Apache HTTP Server

However....apaches default setting in httpd.conf does not allow this, so unless you have root access to alter AllowOverride to include MultiViews in httpd.conf, that probably wont work.

If you can see specific urls in the stats that are repeatedly lacking the extension, you could do redirects in htaccess for each specific url...depends how many urls it is happening to...if that is feasible its just

redirect 301 /good http://www.you.com/good.html

[speed]

The following in your .htaccess should do the trick but you will want to test it fully before you go live with it:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*\.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [L,R=302]

Once you are happy change the R=302 in the last line to R=301, it's easier to work with temporary redirects while testing.

The theory is that if the .html ending is not present and there is not a file or directory of the given name then it rewrites the URL to end .html.

[tonyward99]

Wonderful thanks speed that works perfectly, I was using lighty but just changed to apache so it is a new learning curve, its basically the same with slight differences, I worked out how to do redirects and custom 404 but could not work this one out, thanks all.

[chandrika]

Yep thanks Speed, as I was also trying to do this, but got stuck with the way I was trying to do it.