asked on

Build a catchstring to redirect pages

I have a site that has lost some pages. I am trying to catch the strings in old url from search engines and redirict them to the new replacement page. I am not sure if I am going the right direction with my code. And I have a provlem with url's that are a directory deep.

Here is what I am using:

function stripstuff( $string )
{
  $string = str_replace ( '/', '', $string );
  $string = split ( '[?]', $string );
  strtolower(trim($string[0]));
  return $string[0];
}

    $theFile = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
     if ($theFile == "/" || $theFile == "") 
    {
        // If nothing redirect to home page
        header('Location: index.php'); 
    } 
    else 
    {
        $theFile2 = stripstuff($theFile);
        query database for matching string
        if ($num_rows > '0')
        {
            while ($rowID = mysql_fetch_array($result))
            {  
                $ArticleCkID = $rowID['ArticleID'];
            } 
        }
        else
        {
            header('Location: site-map.php'); 
        }

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I have 3 questions/issues:
1. Is this the best way to achieve this?
2. When there is a sub-folder (www.domain.com/articles/this-is-the-file.php) the catch string has to be "articlesthis-is-the-file.php" for it to find the proper file
and
3. It doesn't show images bacause it is not in the proper folder level.

Ray Paseur

Have you got this in a 404 handler script?

I think I would do it by having a table of relationships - old URL to new URL.

Jeff

ASKER

Thanks Ray,
Yes and Yes. That is exactly what I am doing.
The problem I am having is with the "/". When I remove it ($string = str_replace ( '/', '', $string );
) I am assuming the file to look for will be www.domain.com/file.php. It strips it to file.php. However if it is www.domain.com/folder/file.php it strips it to "folderfile.php". It then is looking for the images from the "www.domain.com/folder/" folder level and no images show.

Jeff

ASKER

As well as looking for "folderfile.php" that doesn't exist.

Ray Paseur

OK, let me ask the obvious question... Why are you removing the directory separators? Why not just translate $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] directly?

Jeff

ASKER

$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] grabs everything after the .com. "/file.php" or "/folder/file.php".

	function stripstuff( $string )
	{
	  $string = str_replace ( '/', '', $string );
	  $string = split ( '[?]', $string );
	  strtolower(trim($string[0]));
	  return $string[0];
	}

	$theFile = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
if ($debug) { echo "URI = " . $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] . "<br />"; }
	if ($theFile == "/" || $theFile == "")

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Ray Paseur

Yes, exactly. It contains PHP_SELF plus the query string. Maybe I am not understanding how your site has been re-organized, but it would seem to me that you could use PHP_SELF or REQUEST_URI to perform a lookup of the new URL, then redirect. Here is the code for one of my catch-all 404 handlers. It lets you have both of these URLs wind up in the same place"

example.com/script
example.com/script.php

Not very sophisticated but it will work for these, too.

example.com/script/foo
example.com/script/foo.php

<?php // 404handler.php
error_reporting(E_ALL);

if (isset($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]))
{
    // IF A PHP SCRIPT IS NOT FOUND GO TO THE HOME PAGE
    if (preg_match('#\.php#i', $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]))
    {
        header('Location: /');
        exit;
    }

    // IF A NON-PHP SCRIPT IS NOT FOUND, TRY IT WITH PHP
    $arr = explode('?', $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);
    $arr[0] .= '.php';
    $uri = implode('?', $arr);
    header("Location: $uri");
    exit;
}

// IF NO REQUEST URI
header('Location: /');
exit;

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Jeff

ASKER

Thanks Ray, I will use some ot that code.

I still have one problem,

When grabbing the url, a folder in between makes it hard to do a search.
Example:
$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] for www.somain.com/foldername/filename.php returns "/foldername/filename.php".

How would I trim this to just "filename.php" so I can search to see if that page exists in my database?

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Ray Paseur

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Jeff

ASKER

What I have is a site that was shut down for about a week. I can look up on google and view the cached pages. Problem is they are shtml. So I am building a catchstring script. I view the cached page, build a new page. Some pages are in the main directory and some are in sub directories. I am trying to strip the subdirectiory then redirect to a page created from the cache.

Does that help to make sense?

Jeff

ASKER

basename() works perfect!

Thanks Ray.