Using htaccess to remove single query parameter
.htaccess, regex
Solution
Try this (i tested it with your examples and it is working fine):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)&?query=[^&]+&?(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /$1?%1%2 [R=301,L,NE]
Also, you should add a condition to apply this rule only on existing files (that's up to you). If you want it:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)&?query=[^&]+&?(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /$1?%1%2 [R=301,L,NE]
Problem
For reasons that aren't worth going into here, Google have been indexing one of my sites with an unnecessary query string in the URL. I'd like to modify my htaccess file to 301 redirect all those requests to the URL without the unneeded part of the query string, but retain any other parts of the query string which may (or may not) be part of the address to make sure other functionality is retained. For example, the following URLs ``` http://example.com/product.php?query=12345 http://example.com/index.php?section=ABC123&query=56789 http://example.com/search.php?query=987654&term=keyword ``` Would become ``` http://example.com/product.php http://example.com/index.php?section=ABC123 http://example.com/search.php?term=keyword ``` Effectively stripping 'query=XXXXX' plus the ? or &, but making sure other queries are retained and in correct syntax after the removal (i.e., just removing ?query=98765 from the third example wouldn't work, as it would leave the link as search.php&term=keyword rather than search.php?term=keyword). Was looking through some other Stack answers and found this: ``` RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)?&?query=[^&]+&?(.*)? [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(.*) RewriteRule .* %3?%1%2? [R=301,L] ``` But that doesn't seem to work, and my knowledge of htaccess & regex isn't good enough to figure out why. Thanks in advance for any pointers.