Help writing a mod_rewrite Rule

I'm such a noob when it comes to mod_rewrite rules. I've been trying to get this rule written for a few hours now using different tutorials, but I'm not having any luck.

Here is the URL that is already programmed into the customers site:

http://www.hissite.com/view_product~product~MagM88.php

And I need that to actually pull up this URL:

http://www.hissite.com/view_product.php?product=MagA1


I guess his previous host used some windows based program to accomplish this rewrite. But I'm trying to get it to work on mod_rewrite with no luck.

If any rewrite experts are out there and could give me a quick rule that would be great.

 

Sorry to be a pest. Can anyone help out with this one?

 

The problem currently is that this customers URL's have been out there for years, and the search engines already have them indexed with the fancy format. Now that he has moved the hosting to me I was hoping to write a mod_rewrite rule to save those rankings for him until he get's re-crawled/ranked.

 

I'll try to search the forums again. The customer did have this working on his other host as I mentioned. It was not done through cube cart though. He used some windows-based program called Link Freeze or something like that, that changed all of his links to these fancy links. I really don't know how that program works exactly.

I'm sure a mod_rewrite could work here? I just am not proficient enough with it to get it to work. I'm sure someone out there is though...

 

Thank you very much for the information. However, I know the tilde isn't worth using. In fact, the customers site is not going to use these formats for the URL's any longer. I still need to update the links for the pictures on the left to the correct URL's.

The problem is again that the search engines have the old "Fancy" URL's crawled and indexed. So the customer doesn't want to lose that traffic. So that's why I'm trying to write a mod_rewrite rule to forward the URLs to the correct place.

The cube-cart link you sent does have info about some mod_rewrite rules, but those are specifically for the "search engine friendly" URL feature already built into cube cart, so it doesn't work for this instance.

This customer didn't use that. They used some Link-Freeze Program to create these custom, fancy URL's.

I'm just trying to see if it is possible at all to do a mod_rewrite rule for this kind of URL:

http://www.hissite.com/view_product~product~MagM88.php

to point to:

http://www.hissite.com/view_product.php?product=MagA1

so he doesn't lose any of his existing traffic from the search engines.

 

Ok, well I came up with a fix. Not exactly what I wanted to do, but it works exactly the way I need it.

First thing I did was wrote this into .htaccess:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/view_product~([^.]+)(.*)$ http://hissite.com/view_product.php?product=$1

Which takes the url and rewrites it as:

http://hissite.com/view_product.php?product=product~MG45

I then went into his view-prodcut.php file and wrote a simple string replace:

$product = str_replace("product~", "", $product);


And tada...things are working.....so forget the mod_rewrite (which would have probably been the better way to do it).