CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.htaccessmod-rewrite
Paul Kienitz
Paul Kienitz

Reputation: 878

How can I use mod_rewrite and preserve the url's fragment (anchor part)?

I'm taking a site that used to be static html (generated by an offline tool) and converting it to PHP. I'm sending all page urls to a single PHP file which parses the url. At first I just stuck FallbackResource MyPage.php in the .htaccess file, and it worked fine... except for urls with a fragment part. Many of the old urls were like /some-page.html#part2, and in the new scheme, part2 is a whole separate page, so I can't ignore that part of the url. With FallbackResource, all that MyPage.php would ever see is /some-page.html.

Now I've read some other questions on here about the topic, such as this one, and it seemed clear that mod_rewrite should in theory be able to do the job, but I can't get it to work. Here's my most current attempt:

Options +Indexes
DirectoryIndex MyPage.php
RewriteEngine on
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^[^:/.?#&]+\.html#(\w+)  MyPage.php#$1    [NC,NE]
RewriteRule ^[^:/.?#&]+\.(html|php)  MyPage.php       [NC]

This works, again, for everything except anchors. It works no better than the old FallbackResource command did. I've tried juggling various parts of this in random ways, such as looking for %23 instead of #, omitting the NE flag, passing the value in a querystring instead of as a fragment, and whatnot.

I will note that I don't want to use redirection to translate the urls -- the PHP has to perform a lookup on it.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 424

Answers (1)

Paul Kienitz
Paul Kienitz

Reputation: 878

Well, I guess the answer is that it can't be done. The fragment part is never even sent to the server as part of the HTTP request. It stays inside the browser. Which means if anyone's saved an old link, it's just gonna go to the wrong page and that's all there is to it.

But I can write javascript into the page to redirect from the client. The PHP can iterate through the known list of old anchors on a given page and emit conditions to send them to the new page.

Upvotes: 2

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