Topic: Rewriterule - what's the difference in this syntax?

[flatcircle]

Hello,

I use following Rewriterule (which works):

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.somedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]


When I use:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.somedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

By using this, some URL's don't work.


Can somebody help me out what the difference is between:
(.*) and ^/(.*)$

Regards.

[tdonovan]

A good technique to understand mod_rewrite problems is to turn on RewriteLog like this:

[flatcircle]

Thanks for the info!

I've stumbled across some examples and to redirect to a new domain (and keep all files/folders intact) I see:

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

and sometimes

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Does this have the same effect?

[James Blond]

You may ask the experts on http://forum.modrewrite.com/

[alex.w474]

In regular expressions, ^ at the beginning means start of the string and $ at the end means end of the string. For the expression ".*" it should not make any difference, because ".*" and "^.*$" means the same.

For example, expression "witsuite.com" and "^witsuite.com" are different: "witsuite.com" matches any string with word witsuite, followed by any character and this any character followed by com. But "^witsuite.com" matches only the strings started with "witsuite":

RegExp: "witsuite.com"
Match: "witsuite.com", "witsuiteacom", "http://witsuitexcom.com"

RegExp: "^witsuite.com"
Match: "witsuite.com", "witsuiteacom"
Not match: "http://witsuitexcom.com"

[flatcircle]

Things are making sense now

Thanks for your help guys!