replace character in rewrite rule - mod-rewrite

Question

Here are my current rules:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^to=(one|seventeen|thirty\+four)
RewriteRule ^/folder/page.php$ http://www.site.com/folder/category/%1? [L]
RewriteRule ^folder/category/(.+)\+(.+)$ http://www.site.com/folder/category/$1-$2 [L]
The first rule works fine, it redirects perfectly if the word is in the query string, but I can't get thirty+four to become thirty-four when redirected.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

For starters, RewriteRule ^/folder/page.php$ will never match anything. The URI's get the prefix (the leading slash) removed if the rules are in an .htaccess file instead of server config.
Secondly, since you've included http://www.site.com/ in your targets, that means the browser will get redirected instead of internally rewritten. You need to remove http://www.site.com/ from your first rule so that the second one can be applied.

Answer 2

Here's what should work:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^to=(one|seventeen|thirty\+four)
RewriteRule ^folder/page.php$ folder/category/%1 [NC,QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^folder/category/(.+)\+(.+)$ folder/category/$1-$2 [NC,QSA,L]
And now three hints:
1)
Please make sure you've read everything here before asking:
Here's the wiki of serverfault.com
The howto's htaccess official guide
The official mod_rewrite guide
2)
Please try to use the RewriteLog directive: it helps you to track down problems:
# Trace:
# (!) file gets big quickly, remove in prod environments:
RewriteLog "/web/logs/mywebsite.rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9
RewriteEngine On
3)
My favorite tool to check for regexp:
http://www.quanetic.com/Regex (don't forget to choose ereg(POSIX) instead of preg(PCRE)!)
You use this tool when you want to check the URL and see if they're valid or not.