Had a bit of trouble with what should have been a simple regex today.

I removed a whole bunch of Pages from our site today, and they were all sat under the same parent. I wanted to redirect the now missing pages to the parent. I came up with this:

^\/dignity-care-reports\/[a-z-]*(\/?)

It worked fine in that it redirected the sub-pages but the parent was now in a redirect loop. So, I headed over to regex101.com to investigate. I quickly found that, yes, this regex did match the parent URL.

The great thing about regex101 is that it gives an explanation of what each of your tokens is doing and I quickly saw:

* matches the previous token between zero and unlimited times

And there’s the problem! Now I just needed any sort of match after that second / to stop the redirect loop and a ‘+’ does the job:

^\/dignity-care-reports\/[a-z-]+(\/?)

You can see the example here: https://regex101.com/r/IfIPpn/1

Now I just need to remember that * can match zero times!