generating an .htaccess file for wordpress migration

January 11, 2009

So, I’ve been working to migrate my ultrasaurus weblog from Movable Type to WordPress (this one will come later). Since all the links were changing anyhow, I decided to move from ugly numbered permalinks to pretty links based on the title of the post. I only had a few hundred posts, but enough so I didn’t want to be doing it by hand. Since I’m learning Ruby and infatuated with it at the moment, I wrote a Ruby script to generate the .htaccess directives.

In case this would be helpful to anyone else, here’s the code:

[sourcecode language=’ruby’]
require ‘date’
require ‘find’

Find.find(‘./archives/’) do |fname|
# puts fname
date_string = “”
title = “”
next if File.directory?(fname)
File.open(fname, “r”) do |f|
f.each_line do |line|
if m = line.match(“(

)(.*)(

)”) then
date_string = m.captures[1]
elsif m = line.match(“(

)(.*)(</h3)") then

title = m.captures[1].downcase
end
end
end

# for some reason my mt archives include some old drafts with no titles
next if title == ""

oldfilename = File.basename(fname)

# 1) remove chars that I think wordpress removes
# 2) change spaces to dashes
# 3) handle this case to avoid —
# Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress – Miniseries or Movie
# also avoid — which I saw in my data, but not sure why it was there
# 4) remove trailing dash if there is one
# Thank you ruby-talk http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/167299
title = title.gsub(/[(,?!'":.+=/)]/, '').gsub(' ', '-').gsub('–','-').gsub(/-$/, '')

# get the new path to the entry, like "/2003/03/brand-new-weblog/"
date = Date.parse(date_string)
newpath = sprintf("%d/%02d/%s/", date.year.to_s, date.month.to_s, title);

# we want something like this:
# redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

output = "redirect 301 /sarahblog/archives/" + oldfilename + " https://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/" + newpath
puts output

end # loop thru files in directory
[/sourcecode]

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