Posted: 19 August 2004 at 2:26pm | IP Logged

Is there an easy way to rewrite all URLs to be lower case?

I would like to give a 301 Permanent Redurect from, e.g,

www.widgets.com/Products to www.widgets.com/Products etc.

The purpose in this is that search engines think that Products and products may be different pages (which they could very well be).  This could adversely affect PageRank.

Posted: 20 August 2004 at 4:52am | IP Logged

Example - write the following rule:

RewriteRule ([^?]*\u.*) /redirect.asp\?$1

This will direct all requests with uppercase characters in it to the redirect.asp page and original URL will be in QueryString. After that you will be able to lowercase this URL and isue a redirect from that page.

Posted: 07 October 2004 at 1:01pm | IP Logged

No.. that's not gonna work for me I don't think...

I run Froums, and all member tracking and conformation is done through cookies.

Cookies however are case sensitive by the root subdirectory they are made from.

e.g. if someone logs on to mydomain.com/TEST and then clicks a link to some web page at mydomain.com/test they loose their cookie and login.

(Snitz forums if anyone was interested)

It might be possible to change the forum code, but since I have so many pages and forums, I want to make ALL http url requests convert to lower case as far as cookies are concerned.

Is that feasible? or would it drop my Win2K server to it's knee's?

I know it is a cookie problem, and poor planning on my part to use upper case in my subdiretory names and code, but I have thousands of pages over four main sbubdiretories with one 8 years old now.

Any suggestions?

Posted: 08 October 2004 at 10:35am | IP Logged

Can't we skip the redirect to another page and just make the whole string lower case in one shot and then send it thru?

Thats what I do for stripping out any www. 's in a url, here is the code I use for that.

# Strip out the www. and redirect.
RewriteCond Host: www\.vales\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://vales.com$1 [I,R]

Actually, I guess it would get a bit complicated if it just flat made everything lower case because of querystring forms...

Some form fields after the url string ?variable= might indeed need to be capitol letters... idea's?

Posted: 08 October 2004 at 10:45am | IP Logged

I have an idea... There are actually only 4 subdirectory names whose case affect my cookies, /MTM2/, /Evo1/, /Evo2/ and /XR/.

All I need to do is the same thing I do to strip out www. right? Look for each of the 4 subs regardless of case, and redirect them with the cases above right?

It doesn't matter if it's all upper, lower, mixed, whatever, just so it is always the same.

Posted: 12 October 2004 at 6:29am | IP Logged

Yes, that is correct! First try his suggestion and revert back us, if you have any problem, so that we can suggest you any other option!

I feel this suggestion will solve your issue!