blanket extension redirect

htaccess help needed

[tom440]

I want to change all the extensions on one of my sites so that I can separate it out of the access log. My new hosting service puts all 5 in the same access log.
What I want to do is have a simple line that changes x.htm, y.htm, and z.htm to x.html, y.html, and z.html without having to write 1000 individual redirects.
Questions:
What is the term for this type of redirect
where do I go to find the code.

[jdMorgan]

In order to get this right, we need to know which is the requested (on-page) URL and which is the actually-existing filetype. Otherwise, we can't even give a good example to get you started.

The distinction between URLs and filepaths is critical to understanding URL rewriting and/or redirection.

For more information, see the documents cited in our forum charter [webmasterworld.com] and the tutorials in the Apache forum section of the WebmasterWorld library [webmasterworld.com].

Jim

[tom440]

the files all have this format
http://example.com/car.htm
and want to change it to
http://example.com/car.html

http://example.com/bus.htm
and want to change it to
http://example.com/bus.html

I have about a 1000 different pages. I want to retain each pages original name and just change the extension. I am not redirecting a page to a different page. Does this help?

[jdMorgan]

Assuming that you are changing your on-page links from "htm" to "html" while the files will remain named ".htm", then an example to rewrite all of them would be:

RewriteRule ^{.*}\.html$ /$1.htm [L]

This rewrites client requests for URLs ending with ".html" to corresponding files ending with ".htm" -- Again, the distinction between a URL-path and a filename is critical, because having been rewritten, they are no longer the same.

Jim

[tom440]

Thank you. That is more than I hoped for. I can edit this to make it work. To be sure this is understood what I am doing as I am sure it is a littlt unusual. When I rename a file from bus.htm to bus.html I will update all the links between pages. I was only looking for a way that people finding a page in a search engine or all the users that have bookmarks can come to the site without getting a 404.

[g1smd]

Serving each page under two filenames, both returning "200 OK" status, is Duplicate Content and should be avoided. One URL of the pair should issue a 301 redirect to avoid that happening.

[tom440]

I plan to delete all the *.htm files