mod rewrite with caps

rewriting domain with word case

[8PDesign]

hi,
I would like mod_rewrite to rewrite my domain URL with the proper case, the way I like it displayed.

so from: ^mYdoMAin.com$ #Ignore case here
to: http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 #rewrite the domain part this way

But I can't seem to get it to work this way:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mYdoMAin.com$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [r=301,C]

thanks in advance for your help!

[edited by: bill at 1:58 am (utc) on Dec. 2, 2009]
[edit reason] unlink example [/edit]

[physics]

Do you want to redirect _all_ versions of your domain that don't look like MyDomain.com (including mydomain.com) to MyDomain.com?
This may be a bad idea for SEO reasons - you'll be redirecting the bots that navigate to your site with mydomain.com to MyDomain.com and there's some possibility that redirects can affect your rankings.

The problem with your example above I think is that it'll cause an infinite loop. You're matching mydomain.com with no case, so MyDomain.com matches. You need to match NOT www.MyDomain.com or NOT MyDomain.com.
I think this will work (untested)

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.)?MyDomain\.com$ 
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] 

[edited by: bill at 12:54 am (utc) on Dec. 2, 2009]
[edit reason] unlinked example [/edit]

[8PDesign]

hi Physics, it does not work, seems to do a redirect loop.

Do you really think redirecting would fuss up the bots?!

thanks!

[physics]

Hmm, not sure why that would happen here.
Are you sure you used "MyDomain.com" (with CamelCase) on both the RewriteCond and RewriteRule lines?
Here's the breakdown of the regex

! # NOT 
 ^ # match beginning 
 (www\.)? # with or without www. 
 MyDomain\.com # match the exact casing MyDomain.com 
 $ # match end 

Unfortunately I can't test right now but maybe you can debug using this as a reference:

[addedbytes.com...]

[physics]

There's some discussion on the 301 effect on rankings here [webmasterworld.com].
Honestly I don't know if it will hurt you - but most of the links you get will probably be of the form
http://www.mydomain.com/
and every time someone clicks or a bot visits that link they'll be 301'd to
http://www.MyDomain.com/

In a world where the engines have enough trouble with canonical www vs non-www domains why complicate things more?

[edited by: bill at 12:56 am (utc) on Dec. 2, 2009]
[edit reason] unlink example [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

Browsers send domains as all-lowercase, so this redirect isn't going to work with any modern browser. The only reason to even consider case in incoming requests hostnames is for badly-coded robots (and malicious ones).

Sorry 8P, but you're up against the HTTP/1.1 specification here... :(

Jim

[swa66]

The host part (FQDN) in a URL is case insensitive per the ruling RFCs. The rest of the URL after it is not case insensitive (not supposed to , till you run into software that breaks that rule like IIS)

[physics]

That's just as well I guess given that it might be a bad idea anyway for the reasons discussed above...