301 Redirect htaccess

[UrbanMark]

Hi Guys,

I have a website that has plenty of links with parameters. For example:
http://www.domainname.co.uk/index.php?app=ecom&ns=catshow&ref=Brandname-Golf-Shorts&sid=201v04gxs2hlozv161tfo43qk98583el

I want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess but don't know what exactly code for this. Ideally I want the URLs above to be:

http://www.domainname.co.uk/Category/Brandname-Golf-Shorts

Any help pls.

Thanks,
Brucz

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Mark, has your question been answered?

[cengelhardt]

Hey Mark,

did this work for you? 
Would be happy to hear back.

In the meantime enjoy your weekend

Christoph

[cengelhardt]

Hey Mark,

it is only 07:21 right now, but I updated my original answer.

Hope you still accept my premature answer

Christoph

[UrbanMark]

Hey Christoph,

No worries, yes anything pre 8am is a risk (coffee depending)!

Look forward to your next deep post 8am comment

Cheers

Mark

[cengelhardt]

Hey Mark,

I should not answer questions in around 6 a.m. Sorry for that

My example works only when you want to redirect from an old domain  to a new one - or from http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com

If you want the links to be on the same domain, things get tricky quite fast. I'll deep dive into the documentation and be right back

[UrbanMark]

Hey Christoph,

Glad our needs can spring you into action

Appreciate that very much, will test it out in the morning and post my findings.

Thanks again, thats great.

Mark

[cengelhardt]

Hey Mark,

Finally a question that I can answer (yay!)

I use the following code on my website:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.it-engelhardt.de/$1 [R=301]</ifmodule>

It basically takes every URL like http://itengelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

and just redirects it (301 of course!) to http://www.it-engelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

UPDATE 1:  (after carefully re-reading the question)

OK, hopefully this is the correct answer to your question:

**Assumptions I made: **

• You want to extract the category name from the query string (i.e. everything after the '?')
• "ns=catshow" in the query string stands for "category show" and tells the server to show a category

Then this is hopefully what you want:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ns=catshow
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ref=([^&]+)
RewriteRule ^index.php /Category/%1? [R=301]

**What it does: **

1. checks if "ns=catshow" is present in the query string
2. extracts the value from the "ref=" variable in the query string and stores it in %1
3. rewrites every request to the server, that matches conditions 1. and 2. and starts with "index.php" to /Category/%1

4. the "?" at the end of "/Category/%1?" tells the server to throw away the original query string - this might not be desirable, if not: remove the '?'
5. the [R=301] tells the server to redirect using HTTP 301

Tested with: http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/