Removing trailing question mark with htaccess

Question

Can someone help me understand this code?

# Remove trailing ?
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ? HTTP [NC] 
RewriteRule .? /%{REQUEST_URI}? [R=301,L]

Answer 1

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ? HTTP [NC] 
RewriteRule .? ^%{REQUEST_URI}? [R=301,L]

Isn't going to work, because ? is a reserved character for regular expressions and you'd need to escape it along with the space. Try:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \?\ HTTP [NC] 
RewriteRule ^/?(index\.cfm)? /? [R=301,L]

Additionally, you want this rule under your # remove trailing index.cfm rule, and not at the very bottom.

Answer 2

1) Case 1: removing question mark

http://example.com/page/subpage/?YOURSTRING=blabla

to redirect to

http://example.com/page/subpage/

then in the beggining of .htaccess, insert:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} YOURSTRING=(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

# if wordpres isnot installed in root folder, then edit the fourth line to this
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /YOUR-WORDPRESS-DIRECTORY/$1? [R=301,L]

2) Case 2: redirection from question mark to another link

http://example.com/index.php?YOURSTRING=blabla&id=44

to redirect to

http://example.com/page/subpage/

Use:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} YOURSTRING=blabla&id=44
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/page/subpage/? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>