Suggestions in redirecting an old URL to new URL with parenthesis () ?

[esiow2013]

What should I use in .htaccess if I will redirect an old URL with parentheses to a new URL like below?

RedirectMatch 301 http://www.olddomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe(7)/red http://www.newdomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe(7)/red

Or

RedirectMatch 301 http://www.olddomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe(7)/red http://www.newdomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe(7)/red

[ThompsonPaul]

So did that process of escaping the special characters solve your issue, esiow?

[esiow2013]

I'll try this one. Big help ThompsonPaul! I'll let you know if this works. Thanks a lot!

[ThompsonPaul]

The successful way to accomplish this can depend a bit on your server configuration, esiow, but the most likely workable and reliable solution is to "escape" the non-standard URL characters. (Actually, the best solution would be to get rid of the unsafe URL characters altogether, but that's not what you asked )

.htaccess rewritedirect rules are essentially regular expressions or regexp. In regexp, many non-URL characters are used to format different commands. So having them as an actual URL character causes the redirect rule to try to process them as regexp instead of as just a URL character. Whew - hope that makes sense.

To tell the redirect rule to treat the non-standard character as an actual character instead of a command - you "escape" it by adding a "****" (without the quotes) in front of each character that could be a problem.

So:

RedirectMatch 301 http://www.olddomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe(7)/red http://www.newdomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe(7)/red

becomes:

RedirectMatch 301 http://www.olddomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe***(7***)/red http://www.newdomain.com/buy/nike-shoes/kobe***(7***)/red

Give that a try in your .htaccess file and let us know if it works. if not, there may be a couple other options to try.

Hope that helps?

Paul