Ahhh! form method POST stopped working after htaccess change!

added simple ^domain.com to www.domain.com and all forms using Post stopped

[johnhamman]

Hi all, I have the following and it kills all form Posts.
Querystring still works, but not _Post.
The only 2 lines I added were

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://wwwthedomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The whole file looks like this.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thedomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.+) 
RewriteRule cat_(.*).html index.php?act=viewCat&catId=$1&%1 [L]
RewriteRule cat_(.*).html index.php?act=viewCat&catId=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.+) 
RewriteRule prod_(.*).html index.php?act=viewProd&productId=$1&%1 [L]
RewriteRule prod_(.*).html index.php?act=viewProd&productId=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.+) 
RewriteRule info_(.*).html index.php?act=viewDoc&docId=$1&%1 [L]
RewriteRule info_(.*).html index.php?act=viewDoc&docId=$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.+) 
RewriteRule tell_(.*).html index.php?act=taf&productId=$1&%1 [L]
RewriteRule tell_(.*).html index.php?act=taf&productId=$1 [L]

I want to redirect any non "www" to www.thedomain but I need the rest to work too!
If I remove the www.redirect it works fine.

[jdMorgan]

For security reasons, HTTP POSTs should never redirected -- Many browsers won't allow it, and since a redirect requires the browser's cooperation, there is no server-side work-around.

Quick fix: Exclude POSTS from the redirect:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^POST$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However, the right way to fix this is to correct your forms and scripts to stop them from trying to POST to your non-canonical domain variants -- For this example, they should all post to www.example.com. That way, their POSTs will never need to be redirected by your new code.

[added]
I think you'll find your serve runs faster if you use more-specific patterns, anchor those patterns, and escape "special regular-expressions-token" characters as required. Example:

RewriteRule ^tell_([^.]+)\.html$ index.php?act=taf&productId=$1 [L]

This saves the pattern-matching engine a whole lot of extra work trying to find a 'floating' match inside the input URL.

For more information, see the concise regex tutorial cited in our forum charter [webmasterworld.com].
[/added]

Jim

[edited by: jdMorgan at 8:19 pm (utc) on May 23, 2007]

[g1smd]

Your domain canonicalisation code should appear after the specific redirects, and specific redirects should force the domain in the target URL... otherwise you create an unwanted redirection chain.