htaccess breaks with (an escaped) dash in the redi

Question

I have a set of URLs that are in the form www.website.co.uk/businessname

and these are meant to do a htaccess Proxy redirect to pull data from another domain on the server.

This is what I have:

#Start Business pages
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} ^www.outputside.org.uk/swellcottage$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.datasite.co.uk/$1 [P]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} ^www.outputsite.org.uk/hawthorn-books$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.datasite.co.uk/$1 [P]
#End Business Pages

The first rule works perfectly, displaying the contents of http://www.datasite.co.uk/swellcottage on the URL www.outputsite.org.uk/swellcottage but the second rule/condition doesn't work.

I looked at escaping the - character in the URL as so:

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} ^www.outputsite.org.uk/hawthorn\-books$
    RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.datasite.co.uk/$1 [P]
    #End Business Pages

But this still doesn't seem to engage correctly, the rewrite rules do not work and the site replies with the fallback 404 that the page www.outputsite.org.uk/hawthorn-books does not exist.

Where else and how else should I escape the dash or otherwise what's wrong with my syntax here? cheers

ps. I have it that filenames (index.php) and folder names (/places/) are not subject to the proxy redirects .

UPDATE

I have more Rules in my htaccess:

#to add www. to each request. 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}s ^on(s)|
RewriteRule ^ http%1://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301]

#Start biz pages
...
#End biz Pages

#to prevent error looping
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} 200
RewriteRule .* - [L]

I have also run the same code above with hawthornbooks without the dash, escaped or otherwise and the code works correctly, so I need to find out the correct way of escaping the dash character. All code and work is UTF-8.

NOTE: This issue appears similar to Why if I put a "-" dash in a rule in my htaccess doesn't work? but I found no solution to that problem.

Answer 1

This is intended to be a temporary rather than a permanent solution, but you might try the following rule:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} ^www.outputsite.org.uk/hawthorn([^\/]*)\/?$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.datasite.co.uk/$1 [P]

This will look for any URI which conforms to the pattern www.outputsite.org.uk/hawthorn followed by any number of characters (or zero characters) which aren't / and then ending with an (optional) /.

Answer 2

If problem is just a hyphen this should work:

#Start Business pages
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?outputside\.org\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(swellcottage)/?$ http://www.datasite.co.uk/$1 [P,NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?outputside\.org\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(hawthorn.books)/?$ http://www.datasite.co.uk/$1 [P,NC]
#End Business Pages