{"id":104,"date":"2013-08-29T11:31:28","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T09:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/?p=104"},"modified":"2013-08-29T11:33:01","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T09:33:01","slug":"redirect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/2013\/08\/29\/redirect\/","title":{"rendered":"mod_rewrite and .htaccess: redirect based on browser language"},"content":{"rendered":"

The previous version<\/a> of miczanin.it had just an index.html<\/em> file in the root folder of the web server, together with few other supporting html files. When someone tried to access http:\/\/www.miczanin.it<\/em>, the index.html<\/em> page was automatically loaded.<\/p>\n

The current configuration is different. There are two distinct WordPress installations, one in subfolder mz_it<\/em> (in Italian), one in subfolder mz_en<\/em> (in English). My goal is to automatically redirect http:\/\/www.miczanin.it<\/em> to mz_it<\/em> or mz_en<\/em>, according to browser language preferences.<\/p>\n

There are many possible solutions, but I think the cleanest one is to use a server-side approach based on .htaccess<\/em> file and mod_rewrite<\/em> module. You can find some documentation, a tutorial and a cheat sheet starting from this page: URL Rewriting for Beginners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is the .htaccess<\/em> file in the root folder of miczanin.it<\/em> web server:<\/p>\n

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>\r\n# Turn on the rewriting engine\r\nRewriteEngine<\/strong> On \r\nRewriteBase<\/strong> \/\r\n\r\n# If Accept-Language starts with 'it',\r\n# then redirect (only) main page to mz_it\r\nRewriteCond<\/strong> %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^it [NC]\r\nRewriteRule<\/strong> ^\/?$ mz_it\/ [R,NC,L]\r\n\r\n# Otherwise, redirect to mz_en\r\nRewriteRule<\/strong> ^\/?$ mz_en\/ [R,NC,L]\r\n<\/IfModule><\/pre>\n
The idea is to exploit the optional Accept-Language<\/em> information that browsers can embed in their HTTP requests. According to the official documentation<\/a>, it is a comma separated list of language definitions. It could be straightforward like ‘it<\/em>‘, or ‘en<\/em>‘, but something more complicated like ‘en-gb;q=0.7<\/em>‘ is also a valid declaration.<\/p>\n
If the language list starts with ‘it<\/em>‘, then http:\/\/www.miczanin.it<\/em> is redirected to mz_it<\/em>. If no language preferences are defined, or if Italian is not the first choice, then the redirection goes to mz_en<\/em>.<\/p>\n
In case ‘it<\/em>‘ appears before ‘en<\/em>‘, but not in first place (example ‘fr, it, en<\/em>‘), then the .htaccess<\/em> rules still redirect to mz_en<\/em>. This behaviour is not desirable, but for the moment I consider the described solution acceptable. I wonder if it is possible to devise a regular expression for RewriteCond<\/em> that looks for ‘it<\/em>‘ appearing before any of the ‘en-*<\/em>‘ or ‘en<\/em>‘…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The previous version of miczanin.it had just an index.html file in the root folder of the web server, together with few other supporting html files. When someone tried to access http:\/\/www.miczanin.it, the index.html page was automatically loaded. The current configuration … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post","tag-webdev"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miczanin.it\/mz_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}