Redirect URLs with underscores to URLs with dashes (hyphens)

After all the re-publishing and researching I did yesterday, I realized that the filenames on my old blog site used underscores - not dashes - and, because of that, some links were broken on this new blog! Ack! (I knew I wanted to use dashes so I thought I had already been using dashes on the old blog!) I was by then too tired to try to fix it.

Today, however, I was ready to tackle this new problem! A Google search for "htaccess underscores dashes" revealed just what I needed! Using .htaccess Voodoo For Underscore and Dash Woes provides the solution with the exact lines to copy and paste into the .htaccess file. Changes I made:

• There were 2 extra spaces that caused 500 errors until I removed them from the last and next-to-last lines just before \.html$
• Changed "RewriteBase /" to the subdirectory for this blog, i.e., "RewriteBase /blog/"
• Since I use .php extensions, I changed .html to .php
• Added lines for $7, $8, $9 ,$10, and $11 because full titles use more than 6 words in some cases

Works like a charm!

[Update October 28, 2007] It seems that the wildcards go to only $9. So I added this line (it's one line, not three!) above the $9 line - it catches the first nine wildcard variables then the lines below this one catch the rest.

RewriteRule ^([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_([^_]*)
_([^_]*)_([^_]*)_(.*)\.php$
http://www.tamemymind.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7-$8-$9.php