How to remove .html from URL?

Question

How to remove .html from the URL of a static page?

Also, I need to redirect any url with .html to the one without it. (i.e. www.example.com/page.html to www.example.com/page ).

Answer 1

To remove the .html extension from your urls, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :

RewriteEngine on


RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.]+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,L,R]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [NC,L]

NOTE: If you want to remove any other extension, for example to remove the .php extension, just replace the html everywhere with php in the code above.

Answer 2

I think some explanation of Jon's answer would be constructive. The following:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

checks that if the specified file or directory respectively doesn't exist, then the rewrite rule proceeds:

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]

But what does that mean? It uses regex (regular expressions). Here is a little something I made earlier...

I think that's correct.

NOTE: When testing your .htaccess do not use 301 redirects. Use 302 until finished testing, as the browser will cache 301s. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/9204355/3217306

Update: I was slightly mistaken, . matches all characters except newlines, so includes whitespace. Also, here is a helpful regex cheat sheet

Sources:

http://community.sitepoint.com/t/what-does-this-mean-rewritecond-request-filename-f-d/2034/2

https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204643270/using-htaccess-rewrite-rules

Answer 3

With .htaccess under apache you can do the redirect like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301] 

As for removing of .html from the url, simply link to the page without .html

<a href="http://www.example.com/page">page</a>

Answer 4

This should work for you:

#example.com/page will display the contents of example.com/page.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.html [L,QSA]

#301 from example.com/page.html to example.com/page
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Answer 5

Thanks for your replies. I have already solved my problem. Suppose I have my pages under http://www.yoursite.com/html, the following .htaccess rules apply.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
   RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]

   RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
   RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
</IfModule>

Answer 6

I use this .htacess for removing .html extantion from my url site, please verify this is correct code:

    RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{http://www.proofers.co.uk/new} !(\.[^./]+)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_fileNAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_fileNAME} !-f
RewriteRule (.*) /$1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^.]+)\.html\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.html$ http://www.proofers.co.uk/new/$1 [R=301,L]