Remove trailing query string from redirected URL

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to redirect some query strings to static pages on www.hardenapp.com (https://hardenapp.netlify.app). My _redirects file has the following line:

/MyCap/ participantCode=:id /MyCap/:id.html 301!

But this changes the link from https://www.hardenapp.com/MyCap/?participantCode=xyz to https://www.hardenapp.com/MyCap/xyz.html?participantCode=xyz. I would like to convert it to https://www.hardenapp.com/MyCap/xyz.html (i.e. remove the query string at the end of the URL).

How do I do this?

Thanks very much!

2

Hi @nathhenry3

Appending the .html to the redirect isn’t valid syntax.

If (for example) there is an /about.html page on your site, this page is available via /about (no .html extension required) so changing the redirect to

/MyCap/ participantCode=:id /MyCap/:id 301!

will likely work as demonstrated in this documentation.

3

Thanks for letting me know about the .html issue @coelmay - I’ve fixed this now.

The redirect is now working on some devices but not in an Android webview, and I wonder if removal of the trailing query string would possibly resolve the issue. Do you know of any way to do this?

Thanks

4

By design the redirects passes through the query string. To stop this happening, you can add a query string as demonstrated in [Support Guide] Making redirects work for you - troubleshooting and debugging

/MyCap  participantCode=:id /MyCap/:id?redir

Whether this solves the issue with Android Webview I cannot say. The only other way to remove the query string (that I am aware of) is using JavaScript on the front end.

5

That works. Unfortunately that hasn’t resolved the WebView issue, but I don’t think that’s any fault of yours. I just uncovered this thread showing that removal of the query string isn’t possible without Javascript yet. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

Thanks for your help!

6

It does state in the documentation previously linked

…our service automatically passes on all query string parameters to destination paths for redirects…

This is handy because you can have a redirect configured, e.g.

/in    /to/somewhere

then have parameters on this URL e.g. (assuming your site is example.com)

https://example.com/in?from=somewhere&via=whoever

which then get passed along automatically e.g.

https://example.com/to/somewhere?from=somewhere&via=whoever

This is great for redirects for affiliate links, UTM Campaign tracking etc. Along with this you can have

/in  utm_campaign=:utm_campaign  /to/somewhere?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=:utm_campaign

so when you use the link

https://example.com/in?utm_campaign=some-cool-campaign

this gets appended to the redirect

https://example.com/to/somewhere?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=some-cool-campaign

meaning you could use the same URL for multiple campaigns on the same platform/site (and if utm_campaign is it missing, the redirect condition fails so does not trigger.)

This is a functionality I am using with a URL shortener I have recently started working on to reduce the number of redirects required.

While I cannot (and do not) speak for Netlify, dropping this functionality isn’t something I would see as advantageous. Possibility they can work around this and offer a way of dropping the query string forwarding on a per-URL basis.

I found reference to Android Webview having issues with query strings in this post from 2012 (yes, 10 years ago!) so this is not a new thing. I also found this workaround though as I don’t partake in Android development, I cannot say if it works or is useful to your use case.