Topic: How include information on last page served in RewriteCond

[Didier Spaier]

Hi there,

here is the situation.

I run a the polyglot website http://slint.fr and my question is about "how to serve a page in the language preferred by the user, if available?"

At the moment I use Multiviews to add a language code to the requested URL according to the AcceptLanguage header (e.g. if "tr", serve index.html.tr instead of index.html), but this information doesn't always match user wish and I was told that serving different filenames for the same requested URI can prevent proper pages indexing by search engines.

So, I will now store web pages in each language in a specific directory, e.g. subdirectories en, it ru, tr, etc. For instance /tr/index.html will be in Turkish.

On every page, user can change language clicking on a link showing e.g. "uk" for Ukrainian. Now I want that once they do that all pages requested by the same client be served in the same language, unless/until user click on another language link.

I know that I could set a cookie or use HTTP-REFERER for that, but possibly the browser can be set to refuse cookies or not sent the Referer HTTP header.

So my question is : knowing that when a user click on a language link we serve a page in the corresponding directory, how could I reuse that information for next request of the same client (same IP address), including it in a RewriteCond directive so that I can serve requested page in the same language directory, if it exists.

I wish to avoid server side scripting (at present the website is 100% static).

[James Blond]

You could use the %{HTTP_REFERER} variable in your rewrite rule.