Comments on: Regex assistance for htaccess puzzle.

Question: Regex assistance for htaccess puzzle.

ao4047 — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:16:48 -0800

Regex assistant for redirecting affiliate links. Currently my affiliate links are structured like:

http://ecommercesystem.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=123456&u=mysalespage.com

Where '123456' is a multiple digit affiliate ID and the u variable is where the ecommerce system sends the referred user after they are tagged by the affiliate system.

I'd like to make it easier for my affiliates to be able to create affiliate links in the form:

http://myssite.com/aff/123456/ppp

Where ppp is a multi-letter product code that tells which salespage to send to. I could have multiple lines in the htaccess for each product code 'aaa', 'cat', 'dog', etc. Hopefully this can be done with a polite 301 redirect.

Thanks!

By: jcruden

jcruden — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:03:51 -0800

Mod rewrite will do exactly what you're looking for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_rewrite

By: ao4047

ao4047 — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:59:52 -0800

Yup - I know. I've been hammering on Regex Coach for a few hours now and I'm not having success yet. Hoping there was a RegEx wiz out there that can do this with their eyes closed.

By: ijoshua

ijoshua — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:58:11 -0800

RewriteRule ^aff/([0-9]+)/([a-z]+) http://ecommercesystem.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=$1&u=$2 [L,R=301]

Im not certain if this is what youre asking for& What is the relationship between ppp and mysalespage.com? Your description seems to indicate that they arent equal, but that there is some mapping. If that is the case, youll need more rules.

By: ao4047

ao4047 — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:07:47 -0800

Let's say I have three products: ABC, DEF, GHI. All of these products are managed in the same ecommerce system and have the same affiliate system but have differnet salespages.

RewriteRule ^aff/([0-9]+)/ABC http://ecommercesystem.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=$1&u=www.abcsalespage.com

RewriteRule ^aff/([0-9]+)/DEF http://ecommercesystem.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=$1&u=www.defsalespage.com

RewriteRule ^aff/([0-9]+)/GHI http://ecommercesystem.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=$1&u=www.ghisalespage.com

I'll try the example you posted. Thanks!

By: ao4047

ao4047 — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:57:09 -0800

The example from above works - thanks so much ijoshua (and jcruden).

By: websavvy

websavvy — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:08:12 -0800

http://www.txt2re.com/ is really cool and helpful for people toying with regular expressions. You can enter an example piece of text and it will generate code which matches whatever portions of it you'd like.