Redirect old links with PHP

I recently moved my blog from Serendipty to WordPress. During this long process I ran into a brick wall.

I had been intending to reuse all of my old URLs and place the new blog in the exact same place as the old blog but I encountered a problem.

The Serendipity blog allowed me to use some special characters in the url, this is something WordPress will not do. This was not a major issue as there are ways to have Apache rewrite URLs for you.

The big problem had to do with the fact Serendipity creates a URL with "index.php?" in it. WordPress does not like the "?" in a URL.

I looked and looked all over the web but everywhere I went told me to put the URLs into a .htaccess file and reroute them that way. I tried that and... because of the "?" all links were being redirected without the argument that followed the "?".

So, if someone followed index.php?/cool-article or index.php? not-so-cool-article they would all be dumped at the main page for my new blog! The redirect was redirecting the index.php request and ignoring everything else.

Being the resourceful programmer that I am I did some digging and found some PHP code that I could use that would grab the argument, remove any forbidden characters and redirect the reader to the right post.

Here it is, use it if you need it. Just to be sure to change the hmtk.com reference!

<?php
$page = basename($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);

$page = str_replace(',', '', $page);
$page = str_replace('+', '', $page);
$page = str_replace('!', '', $page);

       $new_url = "http://www.hmtk.com/archives/" . $page;
       header("Location: $new_url");

?>