We Keep Coding

Redirect to URL from URL

I am wondering how to deal with a simple redirect. I have a domain, for example: stackguy.com. And I want to redirect users to specific URLs from this url.
Let's say, stackguy.com/redirect=youtube.com/watch/xxx
And this URL (youtube.com...) needs to be elastic. What the user enters, it should redirect to the website the user wants.
I have totally no idea, to be honest. I've tried to do it by using database and by separating all urls but it's a lot of work and can't be automated easily.
It can also be done like stackguy.com/red=<id of YT video>
Doesn't matter to me.

The other solution talks about using javascript which runs on the client side. And you probably want this on the server side.
You still need to use a parameter
stackguy.com?redirect=https://www.youtube.com/watch/xxx
But you can use php to do the redirect.
$par = filter_var ($_GET ['redirect'] ?? '', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
if ($par)
{header('Location: ' . $par, true, 302); }
The first line gets the parameter after sanitizing it. It returns blank if its null (or missing)
The second line checks if there is a string
The third line does a redirect using a 302. This is a temporary redirect, I wouldn't advise using a 301 (permanent).
Note that this will only work if the PHP file has done NO HTML output.

I think you should use query parameters for this and handle the redirect in your javascript. Instead of:
stackguy.com/redirect=youtube.com/watch/xxx
use
stackguy.com?redirect=https://www.youtube.com/watch/xxx
Then in your js you can check if the redirect paramter is set and redirect the user to the link in the query parameter.
Here is an example:
function redirectUrl() {
// Get the value of the "redirect" query parameter
const redirect = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search).get("redirect");
// If the "redirect" parameter is not null, redirect the user to the specified URL
if (redirect) {
window.location = redirect;
}
}
To use the function you will need to call it in your code for example:
window.addEventListener("load", redirectUrl);

Redirect to a specific URL with Javascript

what i want to do is simple, let's say I have a URL like this https://www.example.com/pro?type=oil coming from the URL it could anything like /pro?type=beans or /pro?type=rice and what I want is to get the URL redirect it to something like this https://www.example.com/zpro?type=oil. PLEASE THE FIRST URL is /pro? the redirect location is /zpro? Thank you.

If I understand what you want correctly, the below should do it.
window.location.href = window.location.href.replace('/pro?', '/zpro?')

So you can use window.location.href to access the string of the current URL. By setting it to a new value, you can change the current URL! So for you, that means setting window.location.href = window.location.href.replace('/pro', '/zpro'). This will take the string /pro in your URL and redirect to /zpro while keeping your query parameters intact!

Retrieve url query string using javascript to resolve a if/else statement and redirect

I've read about 6 other posts on here about this topic and I still can’t seem to get this to work.
I want to use pure javascript to read a user defined url query string, then have it make a decision about where to redirect the user based on the information in the string.
I have the javascript saved in “script.js”,
this is part of a webpage “https://www.website.com/script.js”,
the url with the query string would look like this “https://www.website.com/script.js?bird=chicken”.
This is what my code looks like:
}
var birdtype = getQueryString('bird');
if ( birdtype == [ chicken ])
window.location.replace = "https://www.website.com/chicken.html";
else
window.location.replace = "https://www.website.com/turkey.html";
};
Please, what am I doing wrong?

You can use .href property instead of replace like
window.location.href = "https://www.website.com/chicken.html"
to redirect to a different page.

Check certain URL in JavaScript?

How can I add something in JavaScript that will check the website URL of someone on a web site and then redirect to a certain page on the website, if a match is found? for example...
the string we want to check for, will be mydirectory, so if someone went to mysite.com/mydirectory/anyfile.php or even mysite.com/mydirectory/index.php JavaScript would then redirect their page / url to mysite.com/index.php because it has mydirectory in the URL, how can I do that using JavaScript?

If I have understood the question correctly, then it is fairly simple and can be achieved using document.URL
var search = 'mydirectory'; // The string to search for in the URL.
var redirect = 'http://mysite.com/index.php' // Where we will direct users if it's found
if(document.URL.substr(search) !== -1) { // If the location of
// the current URL string is any other than -1 (doesn't exist)
document.location = redirect // Redirect the user to the redirect URL.
}
Using document.URL you can check anything in the URL, however you might want to look into using something like Apache's mod_rewrite for redirecting the user before they even load the page.

Check out window.location, particularly it's properties and methods. You would be interested in (part of the) pathname property (you can split it on /) and the href property to change the page.
This is all assuming the javascript is being served in the first place; so I'm assuming anyfile.php and index.php would all result in the JS being served and not some 'generic 404' message.

How many times should a URL-as-a-value-in-a-querystring should be encoded?

I'm really confused how many times should I encode a URL when it is set as a value in a querystring 'coz we know browser has their own encoding process. Here's the scenario:
I want to redirect to another location which I want to pass the previous URL:
Note: the current URL is http://localhost:8081/CostMonitoring/MainMenu.aspx?Option=AllCE
Method A (without encodeURIComponent()):
window.location = 'CostEstimateApproval.aspx?CEMID=40' +
'&ToStatus=1CE'+
'&PrevURL=' + window.location;
I get this in the address bar
http://localhost:8081/CostMonitoring/CostEstimateApproval.aspx?CEMID=40&ToStatus=1CE&PrevURL=http://localhost:8081/CostMonitoring/MainMenu.aspx?Option=AllCE
without encodeURIComponent(), everything works fine and the value of Request.Querystring("PrevURL") in the receiving page is
http://localhost:8081/CostMonitoring/MainMenu.aspx?Option=AllCE
which is correct.
Method B (with encodeURIComponent()):
window.location = 'CostEstimateApproval.aspx?CEMID=40' +
'&ToStatus=1CE'+
'&PrevURL=' + encodeURIComponent(window.location);
with this method I get this in the address bar:
http://localhost:8081/CostMonitoring/CostEstimateApproval.aspx?CEMID=40&ToStatus=1CE&PrevURL=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8081%2FCostMonitoring%2FMainMenu.aspx%3FOption%3DAllCE
and the value of Request.Querystring("PrevURL") in the receiving page is
http://localhost:8081/CostMonitoring/MainMenu.aspx?Option=AllCE
which is also decoded correctly.
My questions:
Should I encode the URL-as-value? Will it be redundant if I encode it then the browser encode it again?
or should I let the browser encode it for me? If I let the browser, will the receiving page be confused from URL-as-a-value's value to the real URL value? Please consider this example:
http://www.domain.com/newpage.aspx?SameName=DifferentValue&PrevURL=http://www.domain.com/oldpage.aspx?SameName=DifferentValue&PrevURL=http://www.domain.com/anypage.aspx
as you can see, both URL (the real URL and the URL-as-a-value) when not encoded has the same data name which is SameName. How does the receiving side handle this? or the HTTP server?
Thanks in advance!

You should use encodeURIComponent (once), since you're encoding a url parameter.
As you noted at the end of your question, failing to encode the url with encodeURIComponent would be problematic if your url included an &, for example.
Note that your Method A only worked because your example prevUrl is somewhat simply formed, e.g. it doesn't include a second url parameter.