I've no experience with regex, and the redirect rule I'm trying to put in my .htaccess file for a WordPress site is having no effect.
I want to redirect:
https://example.com/example/?person=name
to
https://example.com/example/people/name
From reading, I figure my rule ought to be:
RewriteRule \?person=(.*) https://example.com/example/people/$1 [R=301,L]
What am I missing/doing wrong?
From reading, I figure my rule ought to be:
RewriteRule \?person=(.*) https://example.com/example/people/$1 [R=301,L]
You can't match the query string part of the URL using the RewriteRule pattern. The RewriteRule pattern matches against the requested URL-path only. To match the query string you need to use a condition and check the QUERY_STRING server variable.
For example:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^person=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^example/$ /example/people/%1 [QSD,R=302,L]
This needs to go before the existing WordPress directives.
This matches the URL-path exactly as stated in your question, ie. /example/.
%1 (as opposed to $1) is a backreference to the last matched condition, ie. the value of the person URL parameter, that occurs as the first URL parameter.
The QSD (Query String Discard) flag (Apache 2.4+) is required to remove the query string from the target URL. If you are still on Apache 2.2 then append an empty query string (ie. append a ?) to the end of the subsitution string instead.
