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Mod_Rewrite Condition to Redirect External Referrers

We inflate EPUB's on our web site in advance, save them to e.g.

/public_html/media/books/#some-book-title#/web/ops/xhtml/some-page1.html

We then use LiveCode - RevIgniter to serve these inside an iFrame, inside our site wrapper.. this works great.

BUT the problem is Google is finding these pages, indexing and caching them and they are linked to and delivered outside our site wrapper. e.g.

http://dev.himalayanacademy.com/media/books/merging-with-siva/web/ops/xhtml/part_2ch_34a.html

I need to create a mod_rewrite condition that will redirect these to our CMS

in pseudo-code it would look like

IF
( RewriteCond $1 ^(media/books/[any string here, some reg ex I presume]/web/ops) ) AND (referrer IS NOT localhost)
THEN
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.lc?/$1 [L]
END IF

can you help me with the proper mod_rewrite rule for this?

Thanks!

Steve Bink

Your pseudo code is very similar to your actual need:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?(media/books/(some regex)/web/ops) /index.lc/$1 [L,NC]

Open in new window

You'll need to be more explicit about (some regex), but that is the general form you want.

Brahmanatha

ASKER

Interesting... very simple really.

"be more explicit about (some regex)" right...

The string ##-###-### that forms the URL segment between "books" and "web"

is a single string with no slashes (no additional segments)

/media/books/ ##-###-## /web/ops

where #######is the title of a book. The strict convention on our site is: all lower case letters, words words delimited by dashes, underscore at the end followed by ISO 2 ltr language code where not English e.g.

the-guru-chronicles
dancing-with-siva_es # in spanish

Some works in other languages have their titles in those languages, but the convention is that these strings ("file_id" in our mySql database) are always in the 0-127 range (ASCII) no unicode and no ANSI roman chars such as umlauts etc. have trouble with figuring out how to make my reEx from being too "greedy") in needs to stop at the next slash in the URL string. How's this for an attempt?

RewriteRule ^/?(media/books/(.*?)/web/ops) /index.lc/$1 [L,NC]

or possibly more explicit?

RewriteRule ^/?(media/books/(.*\/)web/ops) /index.lc/$1 [L,NC]

Where the regex ends at the next slash?

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Steve Bink

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Brahmanatha

ASKER

the whole URL... our controller will need to see "/media" at beginning plus the matched title and the final segment, which is the page in the book to target. From there we will use another model/library script to display the page in our views.

Thanks for your help!

Brahmanatha

ASKER

Hmmm I had to extend this a bit:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^localhost$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?(media\/books\/[-a-z_]+\/web\/ops\/xhtml\/.*) /index.lc/$1 [L,NC]

and now it works! at least our CMS gets the URL...

Brahmanatha

ASKER

Thanks Steve!