URL Rewrite Matching Regex to a "?" in the URL

Question

I am using iis 7 and trying to create a rewrite rule that will look for the following URL:

http://www.example.com/Toys/?GOOGLE/USA/Wood/trains

I'm using the following web.config which works if I omit the "?" from the URL.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="Toys" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^Toys/(.+)/(.+)/(.+)/(.+)" />
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="/toys/index.cfm?a={R:1}&amp;b={R:2}&amp;c={R:3}&amp;d={R:4}" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

They already have the "?" hard coded in a few thousand URLS submitted to the search engines for PPC urls.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish.

Toys/(.+)/(.+)/(.+)/(.+)

Debuggex Demo

Eliminating the start-of-line anchor (the ^) matches your example url. With the anchor, it doesn't match, because there's text before the Toys.

Note, however, the url I put on the second line, which contains extra path elements. Your regex captures ?GOOGLE/USA/Wood/trains in the first group, because each element in your regex is .+ which is "any character, and as many as possible". Because it's greedy, it consumes these extra elements.

It would be safer to exclude slashes from each captured portion:

Toys/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)

Debuggex Demo

Note the difference in what it captures: Never more than four path elements, and only one element in each capture group.

An alternative (which is fine, but I prefer the slash-version above) is to make each element in your original regex reluctant:

Toys/(.+?)/(.+?)/(.+?)/(.+?)

Debuggex Demo

• Greedy causes that portion of the regex to match as much as possible (as long as the overall regex can still match).
• Reluctant causes that portion to match as little as possible (as long as the overall regex can still match).

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