.htaccess help

fixing uppercase/lowercase file access

[Newsmaker]

my site uses a mix of uppercase and lowercase file names. How do I configure my .htaccess file to ignore case?
Thx

[jdMorgan]

Newsmaker,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

Some of the directives used in .htaccess can be set to be case insensitive - mod_rewrite uses the [NC] flag, for example.

However, I'm not aware of any case-conversion capability.

The two alternatives that come to mind are:

Rename your files to all-lowercase

Create a case-conversion script, and call it from .htaccess. The script could do the case-conversion, and then <include> the originally-requested content.

HTH,
Jim

[Newsmaker]

Would love to rename all pages..but too many of the pages are indexed by Google and are driving traffic to my site (which is how i earn a living). My problem is I had the same page spidered by google, msn, hotbot before and after i made case revisions. For example:
orginal page = www.mysite.com/XXX.htm
current page = www.mysite.com/xxx.htm
My hosting server company is unix based and therefore is case sensitive.

It would be disaster for me to change all to lowercase - takes 90 days to clear out search engine indexes.

So => is there any way .htaccess can allow a user to find my pages whether they type in upper or lower case urls?

Thanks
B

[jdMorgan]

Newsmaker,

If you have a limited number of uppercase pages, then you can use mod_alias [httpd.apache.org] or mod_rewrite [httpd.apache.org] to redirect from the uppercase to the lowercase version using a 301-Moved Permanently redirect. Rename the files to all-lowercase and fix the site-internal links. Over time, the engines will drop the uppercase versions, and you can remove the redirects.

If you have a huge number of pages, then my original post applies:
> Create a case-conversion script, and call it from .htaccess. The script could do the case-conversion, and then <include> the originally-requested content.

Jim