redirect short url to a long url.

[chetanmadaan]

we have a long url which we send to users in email and sometimes they have problems clicking it. so, we want to shorten the url to something in few characters.


long url: index.php?option=vm&page=downloads&product_id=6&file_name=soft.exe&id=#*$!X

the #*$!X will be the download id per customer.

short url: www.oursite.com/pdownload?#*$!X

is there a htaccess redirect we can do here?

Thanks

[g1smd]

Yes, it is one line of code if you DON'T use a parameter. Place the code quite near the beginning of your .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^pdownload-([0-9]+)$ http://www.example.com/index.php?option=vm&page=downloads&product_id=6&file_name=soft.exe&id=$1 [R=301,L]

If you use a parameter the code is more complicated, and there's several gotcha's that will come into play.