RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(old_url|older_url/old_page)/$


Note that this trailing slash is only required if you’re rewriting your urls in htaccess to include them. If you are removing them in htaccess, remove the end slash. If you’re not touching them in htaccess, don’t use the $ at the end (but only if you don’t mind losing all directories under the directories you’re skipping in this rewritecond)

I had the same issues and came up with a pretty good fix that allows me to use both the include method for removing htaccess, the ? fix after index.php, and normal 301 redirects.

First it’s worth noting that changing to CGI instead of FastCGI works perfectly. It seems that only FastCGI requires the ? to trigger queries. But I don’t want to lose the performance boost of FastCGI.

Basically, it seems that the 301s only run after all the rewriterules (regardless of placement within htaccess. So you can’t 301 before the rewriterule runs. And if the rewriterule runs prior to the 301, the index.php? gets carried along and leaves that ? as a fragment in the url.

So in order to 301 without having the index.php? added, you can simply exclude those urls you want to 301 from the main rewriterule, with a custom rewritecond.

My include method section looked like this:


# Exclude paths with an extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5})$
# Exclude bad file paths
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
# Include anything starting in these segments
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(Every possible segment_1 goes here, pipe-delimited|P[0-9]{2,8}) [NC]
# Rewrite the url with the index.php?
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1/ [L]


I added a line at the beginning like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(old_url|older_url/old_page)$


Then elsewhere in htaccess:

redirect 301 /old_url/ http://domain.com/new_url/
redirect 301 /older_url/old_page/ http://domain.com/another_url/


So basically you allow the old paths to pass through htaccess unscathed (aside from adding or removing www, adding or removing a trailing slash, whatever). Then the client hits the 301 and goes to the new url, which also hits htacess but this time gets the index.php?

Hope this helps!

Fingers crossed it will be simple from here on… (yeh right)

results in a redirect to
http://www.domain.com/foo/?/bar/

so far no luck figuring out why and how to fix it.