Redirect regex misbehaving when placeholder empty

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  • The problem with your RegEx patterns:

    /code-examples/(.*)
/code-examples/android/(.*)

    is that they only match when the ending slash (/) is present in the URL; e.g.:

    # Example 1: $1 is 'page1'
/code-examples/page1
/code-examples/android/page1

# Example 2: $1 is '' (empty)
/code-examples/
/code-examples/android/

# Example 3
# No matches because the ending / is not present.
/code-examples
/code-examples/android

    where the “placeholder” (i.e. (.*)) matches the page1 in the first example, and '' (i.e. empty string) in the second example.

  • To make these work:

    /code-examples
/code-examples/android

    you can use (?:/?(.*)|\b) instead of /(.*), like so:

    /code-examples(?:/?(.*)|\b)
/code-examples/android(?:/?(.*)|\b)

  • But since you redirect to the same URL (/tutorials/android/$1/), you can combine those RegEx patterns like so:

    /code-examples(?:/android|)(?:/?(.*)|\b)

    where /code-examples(?:/android|) matches either /code-examples or /code-examples/android.

I added the redirects with the Redirection plugin.

I suppose you have something like this on the Tools → Redirection → Redirects page (in wp-admin):

Now with the combined RegEx pattern, delete the second Redirect and edit the first one like so:

Note: For the Type and Group settings, just use your existing setup.

Resources: