RewriteRule problem

Need to remove some text AND change file ext

[cookie2]

Regular expressions and I aren't friends. ;)

I need to redirect a file request using htaccess. The file being requested is:

http://example.com/blogs/myblog/2014/05/ready_130_tourist_in_the_wild.htm

I need to remove the "ready_130_" (numbers will vary) as well as change the file extension from .htm to .html

I've tried several incarnations of things, most recently this but it throws a 500 server error and I'm stuck now:

RewriteRule (blogs/myblog/)(\d{0,4}/)(\d{0,2}/)ready_[0-9][0-9][0-9]_(.*) http://example.com/$1$2$3$4l [R=301,L]

Any help offered would be appreciated. Thanks.

[lucy24]

Why are there four captures when all you need to retain is before and after? I'm looking at

RewriteRule ^(blogs/myblog/\d+/\d+/)ready_\d+_([^.]+)\.htm http://example.com/$1$2.html [R=301,L]

That's assuming you have other RewriteRules so the
RewriteEngine on
directive is already present. But its absence wouldn't lead to a 500 error; it just prevents the rule from executing.

It's safer to simply omit the whole extension from the capture, and reappend a new one. You don't ever have literal periods in your filenames do you?

[cookie2]

Yes, ReWrite Engine is on for others. I tried to do it in 4 captures because I didn't know I could do it in less. And I wasn't aware of a way to omit file extension and reappend a new one.

Looking at what you did makes sense when I see it but when I try to come up with a way to do it in my head, it's like I blank out and try to figure how to do each capture instead of one or two for everything.

Thank you for your help, lucy.

[g1smd]

Capture the bits for re-use that you need to. Bracketing is numbered lest to right.

Don't capture the bits that will be changed or discarded. Once you have done it a few times it becomes easier.