301 redirect problems and Actinic 5.16

using redirects breaks Actinic Catalogue :(

[GeordieSEO]

One of our customers has a problem with their catalogue.
Firstly, for some reason a lot of the sections have no name set in the URL section. This means that when the client changes the section title it changes the URL's.

The catalog version is 5.16 but at some point it was upgraded from 4.xx to 5.xx - I don't know if this is significant.

In order to solve the 404 errors I want to setup 301 redirects for the old URL's to the new ones. (I also intend to put names in all the sections to hopefully fix the errors).

I have written the .htaccess file and it is in the correct format

e.g.
redirect 301 /acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Shoes____Split_Sole__31.html http://www.example.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Shoes____Split_Sole__92.html

However, when I upload the .htaccess file I cannot view the catalog - I just get 500 server errors.

e.g. for a URL that does work without a redirect the error log shows the following:
[Fri Nov 7 09:53:25 2003] [alert] [client xx.****.****.xx] /www/vhtdocs/example/.htaccess: URL to redirect to is missing

Any ideas on the problems?

[edited by: jdMorgan at 11:03 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2003]
[edit reason] Examplified URLs/domains/paths [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

GeordieSEO,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

That error message sounds like it simply can't find the new URL - the parser can't figure out the directive you typed. I'm wondering if it doesn't like something -- such as the multiple underscores in the pathnames.

You could try using the RedirectMatch directive instead, which will accept regular expressions, also allowing you to use quotes around the strings to prevent confusion.

Jim

[GeordieSEO]

solved it -

for some reason in the last redirect instead of a space there was some unkown character. Replacing this solved the issue.

Also replaced the permanent redirects with RedirectMatch

Thanks for the help