301 Redirect to replace all spaces to hyphens

Question

So here's my problem. I took over a site that has has a bunch of pages indexed that have %20 indexed in Google. This is simply because the person decided to just use the tag name as the title and url slug. So, the urls were something like this:

http://www.test.com/tag/bob%20hope
http://www.test.com/tag/bob%20hope%20is%20funny

I have added a new field for the url slug and string replaced all spaces with dashes. While I have no problem linking to these new pages and getting the data, I need to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs, which would be something like:

http://www.test.com/tag/bob-hope
http://www.test.com/tag/bob-hope-is-funny

So, it needs to be able to account for multiple spaces.

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-21 18:04:55Z

12

Use these rules in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

# keep replacing space to hyphen until there is no space use internal rewrite
RewriteRule ^([^\s%20]*)[\s%20]+(.*)$ $1-$2 [E=NOSPACE:1]

# when there is no space make an external redirection
RewriteCond %{ENV:NOSPACE} =1
RewriteRule ^([^\s%20]+)$ $1 [R=301,L]

This will replace all space characters (\s or %20) to hyphen -

So a URI of /tag/bob%20hope%20is%20funny will become /tag/bob-hope-is-funny with 301

Brief Explanation: If there are more than 1 space in URI then 1st RewriteRule is fired recursively replacing each space character with hyphen - until there is no space left. This rule will only rewrite internally.

Once no space is left 2nd RewriteRule is fired which just uses a 301 redirect to the converted URI.

edited Sep 21, 2013 at 18:04

answered Apr 28, 2011 at 18:23

anubhava

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8 Comments

Compeek Over a year ago

The DPI flag is new to me, so maybe I just don't know how this works, but doesn't this keep rewriting, removing one space at a time, until all of the spaces have been replaced? I supposed that works, but it seems a bit complicated. He also needs it to actually do a 301 redirect, and it doesn't look like this will do that. Correct me if I'm mistaken, though.

Compeek Over a year ago

Thanks for adding the explanation! I learn something new on Stack Overflow every day. :)

0x_Anakin Over a year ago

what about urls that start with a space? like domain.com/ test test test /test

anubhava Over a year ago

@PanagiotisGeorgeRaditsas: I believe it should work. If it doesn't please feel free to post a new question with link to this one and leave a comment here. I will sure try to fix that.

0x_Anakin Over a year ago

@anubhava Hello once again mate please take a look at this post it describes my issue as I stated above, thank you. stackoverflow.com/questions/18935257/…

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Steve Workman · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-26 19:48:56Z

5

Building on @anhubhava's answer, it's close, but that will also match %,2 or 0 in the URL, and it can cause a loop on apache 2.2 if you don't use the DPI parameter. The full script should look like this:

Options FollowSymlinks MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

# keep replacing space to hyphen until there is no space use internal rewrite
RewriteRule ^([^\s%20]*)(?:\s|%20)+(.*)$ $1-$2 [N,E=NOSPACE:1,DPI]

# when there is no space make an external redirection
RewriteCond %{ENV:NOSPACE} =1
RewriteRule ^([^\s%20]+)$ $1 [R=301,L]

I've also added the N (Next) parameter as this then forces the rules to be re-evaluated from the start straight after this rule if it matches. If this isn't there, you can get problems if you're using apache as a reverse proxy as it's unlikely that it'll get to the end of the rewrites before something else happens.

answered Nov 26, 2015 at 19:48

Steve Workman

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1 Comment

null Over a year ago

It seems it doesn't work with urls that contain numbers.

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