How can I redirect directory using htaccess including files with spaces in the names

Question

Hi, I am dealing with a situation where someone has handed me a bunch of old files on the server which already have a lot of incoming links directly to them (mostly pdf files). I now have the files organized but in a different directory. Before it was 'domain/manuals/file' now it is 'domain/media/manual/file'. I am trying to resolve this issue using an htaccess file.

Many of the files have spaces in the names (not something I can control) and because they already have links to them I can't just go through renaming them. I have found that I can redirect files individually when they have spaces in the names by using quotes such as:

redirect 301 "/manuals/file 123.pdf" "http://www.domain.com/manuals/file 123.pdf"

However, there are loads of these files and I wondered if there is a way to create a regular expression that will handle spaces in file names that I could use to redirect the entire directory. I should add that some files contain decent file names with no spaces in, some have one space and others more than one space. It's not pretty.

If you've encountered this problem before I would really appreciate hearing your advice, I'm running out of ideas.

Thanks.

Answer 1

What about:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/manuals/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/media/manual/$1

The (.*) matches any character following /manuals/ in the URL.

Note: Redirect and RedirectMatch are part of mod_alias, not mod_rewrite (as the question was tagged) so forgive the earlier mod_rewrite rule I posted.

Answer 2

If you need characters for spaces in a URL, you can use %20 which is the URL Encoding of a space.

Answer 3

Redirect can work on whole directories at once.

Redirect permanent /manuals/ http://www.domain.com/manuals/

Then you don't have to worry about escaping spaces to %20, or any other character. Apache will redirect every file under that path to the same file under the destination URL.

(RedirectMatch exists as well for regex matching; you don't need to resort to that for this though.)