htaccess to rewrite param=NUMBER into /text

Question

I am trying to figure out how to rewrite URLs from something like this: example.com/collection.php?collection=1

Into: example.com/collection-name.php

I recently redesigned an e-commerce site and need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. I've seen loads of instructions on how to use the value of collection=1 in a rewritten URL but not how to use text instead of the value. There are only 5 collection values that need to be redirected but in addition there are also old URLs that have multiple params in them that also need to be rewritten/redirected as text. I hop that made sense.

So I think I can get them all worked out if I can get the initial redirect set up.

Other/more complex old URLs look like this: example.com/collection.php?collection=1&product=2&item=3

Which would then need to be redirected to: example.com/collection-name/sub-collection-name/product-name.php

Not sure exactly how to go about doing this. I don't want to write line after line in the .htaccess file but I have no idea of how else to accomplish this.

Thanks in advance, I appreciate andy and all help in this matter!

EDIT------------------------------------ Here's my new rewrite condition and rule based on the info provided to me. This would be the rule for the URLs containing all the query params using 3 separate RewriteMaps.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} collection=([^&]+)&product=([^&]+)&item=([^&]+)
RewriteRule collection.php shop/${categorymap:%1}/${rangemap:%2}/${productmap:%3}\.php [R=301,L]

Please let me know if anything looks off or I missed anything. Wasn;t sure if I needed to use $1, $2, $3 for each of the query params. I'm still a NOOB with rewrites. Thanks!

Edit------------------------------------------------------

Using the following code in my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} collection=([^&]+)
RewriteRule collection.php shop/${categorymap:%1}\.php [R=301,L]

My URLs that start as "example.com/collection.php?collection=1

Are being rewritten as: example.com/shop/.php?collection=1

I am a bit lost on this one. Could it be that my Redirect Maps are not being read? Or is it something else? Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

You want to look into using a RewriteMap. You can specify the maps you want for collection, sub-collection and products, and then look up the text for each number.

So you would define a RewriteMap in your virtualhost config with something like

RewriteMap categmap txt:/path/to/category/map.txt

Then your rewrite rule would look something like

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} collection=([^&]+)
RewriteRule collection.php ${categmap:%1} [L,R]

Add more RewriteConds for your more complicated cases and make separate rules out of them. Place the more specific rules first in the file, then the more general ones.