I am trying to redirect visitors of my home directory to different
subdirectories, depending on the accept language header sent by the
browser. For this I wrote a .htaccess file with the following content:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE} ^de [NC]
RewriteRule ^/ http://www.domain.com/de/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE} ^en [NC]
RewriteRule ^/ http://www.domain.com/en/ [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^/ http://www.domain.com/no/ [L,R=301]

But when I go to www.domain.com (with my browser set to "de" or "en" -
I checked that this is indeed transferred), I always end up in the
.../no directory. Does RewriteCond not understand the
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable, or did I make some mistake?

All this is happening on Apache 1.3.33

(And yes, I know that I can direct visitors to different files using
AddLanguage etc., but I want to direct them to subdirectories.)

On 2 Feb 2006, Manfred Kooistra wrote:

> RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE} ^en [NC]
> RewriteRule ^/ http://www.domain.com/en/ [L,R=301]
> RewriteRule ^/ http://www.domain.com/no/ [L,R=301]

"no" is a bad choice, because it would suggest "Norwegian".

> Does RewriteCond not understand the
> HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable,

So it is.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod...ml#RewriteCond

> or did I make some mistake?

Yes, you tried to solve a problem with mod_rewrite where you
should use other tools.

> (And yes, I know that I can direct visitors to different files using
> AddLanguage etc.,

Fine, then. Problem solved.

Andreas Prilop schrieb:

> "no" is a bad choice, because it would suggest "Norwegian".

It is in fact supposed to mean "Norwegian" - that is the default
language in my example.

> > Does RewriteCond not understand the
> > HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable,

> > or did I make some mistake?
>
> Yes, you tried to solve a problem with mod_rewrite where you
> should use other tools.

Well, there are quite a few examples on the web, where people utilize
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE in exact the same way as I tried to do. Obviously
they were all mistaken. Strange.

Anyway, how can I get a redirect into a subdirectory based on
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE? AddLanguage does not do this (it only adds an
extension), and I cannot limit it to the current directory (because it
works on all subdirectories as well). So how to do it?

Andreas, this is my solution to the problem (example for two
languages):

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^.*de.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(index\.php)?$ http://www.domain.com/de/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Language} ^.*en.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(index\.php)?$ http://www.domain.com/en/ [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^(index\.php)?$ http://www.domain.com/de/ [L,R=301]

Yes, the regular expression will be refined not to serve "de" to
someone prefering English but knowing German, nor to someone not
wanting German and stating "de; q=0".