Redirector is an extension for Firefox that allows you to automatically redirect from
+ one webpage to another. For example, every time you visit http://abc.com you will automatically
+ load http://def.com instead. This can be useful for instance to always redirect articles to printer friendly
+ versions, redirect http:// to https:// for sites that support both, bypass advertising pages that appear before
+ being able to view certain pages and more.
+
+
+
Basic usage
+
To add a new redirect you can go to the Tools menuitem and select Redirector. That will
+ open the Redirector settings window which shows all your redirects. The window can also be opened
+ by right clicking on the R icon in your statusbar.
+ There you can press the Add... button and then you can enter the details for the new redirect. A redirect
+ consists of a few things:
+
+
Example url: This is an example of an url you want to redirect. It is not really used for anything,
+ it's just there to show what types of urls you're targetting. You can leave this out, but then you can't use the Test pattern button.
+
+
Include pattern: This is pattern for the urls you want to redirect. In the simplest case, where you just want
+ to redirect one specific url to another then this will just be the exact url you want to redirect. For instance, if you just want http://aaa.com to
+ redirect to http://bbb.com then Include pattern will just be http://aaa.com. For more complex patterns that match many
+ urls you can use either wildcards or regular expressions.
+
+
Exclude pattern: Urls that match this pattern will never be redirected. This is not necessary to
+ fill out, but can be useful when you want to redirect all urls that contain some text except if they contain some other text.
+ Redirects like that can often be done with a complex regular expression, but using an exclude pattern makes it much simpler. The exclude
+ patterns can use wildcard characters or regular expressions like the include patterns.
+
+
Redirect to: This is the url that you will be redirected to when you open any page where the url matches the
+ include pattern. You can use the special signs $1, $2, $3 etc. in the url, they will be replaced by the results of captures with regular
+ expressions or stars with wildcards. For instance, if you have the include pattern http://google.com/*, redirect to http://froogle.com/$1
+ and you open the page http://google.com/foobar, then you will be redireced to http://froogle.com/foobar, since 'foobar' was what the star replaced. $1 is for the
+ first star in the pattern, $2 for the second and so on. For regular expression $1 is for the first parantheses, $2 for the second etc.
+
+
Pattern type: This specifies how Redirector should interpret the patterns, either as
+ wildcards or regular expressions.
+
+
Unescape matches: A common usage of Redirector is to catch urls like
+ http://foo.com/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbar%2Ecom%2Fpath and try to catch the url parameter and redirect to it. A pattern
+ like http://foo.com/redirect.php?url=* might be used for that purpose. However, if the url parameter is escaped (also known
+ as urlencoded) then that won't work. In the url above we see that it starts with http%3A%2F%2F instead of http://, and Firefox
+ won't accept this as a new url to redirect to. So, in cases like these you can check the Unescape matches option and then all
+ matches will be unescaped (turned from e.g. http%3A%2F%2Fbar%2Ecom to http://bar.com) before being inserted into the target url.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
Wildcards
+
+
Wildcards are the simplest way to specify include and exclude patterns. When you create a wildcard pattern there
+ is just one special character, the asterisk *. An asterisk in your pattern will match zero or more characters and you can
+ have more than one star in your pattern. Some examples:
+
+
http://example.com/* matches http://example.com/, http://example.com/foo, http://example.com/bar and all other urls that start with http://example.com/.
+
http://*.example.com matches all subdomains of example.com, like http://www.example.com, http://mail.example.com.
+
http*://example.com matches both http://example.com and https://example.com.
+ $1, $2, $3 in the redirect urls will match the text that the stars matched. Examples:
+
+
http://example.com/* matches http://example.com/foobar, $1 is foobar.
+
http://*.example.com/* matches http://www.example.com/foobar, $1 is www, $2 is foobar.
+
+
+
+
+
Regular expressions
+
+
Regular expressions allow for more complicated patterns but they are a lot harder to learn than wildcards. I'm not gonna
+ create a regex tutorial here but normal javascript regex syntax works, look at http://regular-expressions.info for
+ an introduction to regular expressions. $1,$2 etc. can be used in the redirect url and will be replaced with contents of captures in
+ the regular expressions. Captures are specified with parantheses. Example: http://example.com/index.asp\?id=(\d+) will match the url
+ http://example.com/index.asp?id=12345 and $1 will be replaced by 12345. (A common mistake in regex patterns is to forget to escape
+ the ? sign in the querystring of the url. ? is a special character in regular expressions so if you want to match an url with a querystring
+ you should escape it as \?).
+
+
+
Examples
+
+
+
+ Static redirect
+ Redirects from http://example.com/foo to http://example.com/bar
+
+ Include pattern: http://example.com/foo
+ Exclude pattern:
+ Redirect to: http://example.com/bar
+ Pattern type: Wildcard
+
+
+
+
+ Redirect using query string parameter and wildcards
+ Redirects from http://example.com/index.php?id=12345&a=b to http://example.com/printerfriendly.php?id=12345&a=b
+ where 12345 could be any number.
+
+ Include pattern: http://example.com/index.php?id=*&a=b
+ Exclude pattern:
+ Redirect to: http://example.com/printerfriendly.com?id=$1&a=b
+ Pattern type: Wildcard
+
+
+
+ Redirect using query string parameter and regular expressions
+ Redirects from http://example.com/index.php?id=12345&a=b to http://example.com/printerfriendly.php?id=12345&a=b
+ where 12345 could be any number.
+
+ Include pattern: http://example.com/index.php\?id=(\d+)&a=b
+ Exclude pattern:
+ Redirect to: http://example.com/printerfriendly.com?id=$1&a=b
+ Pattern type: Regular Expression
+
+
+
+ Redirect to a different folder using wildcards
+ Redirects from http://example.com/category/fish/index.php to http://example.com/category/cats/index.php
+ where fish could be any word. The exclude pattern makes sure that there is only one
+ folder there, so for instance http://example.com/category/fish/cat/mouse/index.php would not match.
+
+ Include pattern: http://example.com/category/*/index.php
+ Exclude pattern: http://example.com/category/*/*/index.php
+ Redirect to: http://example.com/category/cats/index.php
+ Pattern type: Wildcard
+
+
+
+ Redirect http to https using wildcards
+ Redirects from http://mail.google.com/randomcharacters to https://mail.google.com/randomcharacters
+ where randomcharacters could be anything.
+
+ Include pattern: http://mail.google.com*
+ Exclude pattern:
+ Redirect to: https://mail.google.com$1
+ Pattern type: Wildcard
+