Modification of .htaccess to not only remove "index.php", but ALSO "index.php?" with the question mark!

Hello, Everyone!!!

I am hoping that someone can help me here!

I have a very old site that is being run on godaddy where I had to use the “?” in the “index.php?”,and I’m making the first real changes to it in something like eight years. I am updating this site, moving to another host, but I want to modify the .htaccess file to keep my links forwarding to the correct place.

Ideally, I would like to use a 301 redirect to change, but I realize now that a redirect can’t remove the “?”. So, I need to rework the rewrite rules and conditions, and I need help!

Just to spell out what I’m trying to do, here is the original link:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?/old-template-group/old-page-template/this_is_the_article

…and I’m trying to get that to automatically redirect to:

http://mysite.com/new-template-group/new-page-template/this_is_the_article

I can successfully remove the index.php, the www., and change the old segments 1 and 2 to the new ones via the following:

I’m using this cut and pasted straight out of the EE3 documentation for removing the “index.php”:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /

        # Removes index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs
        RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/coast/.* [NC]
        RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,NE,L]

        # Directs all EE web requests through the site index file
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

…and it definitely successfully removes the “index.php” without any issues.

…and, worthy of mention, I’m using a generic rewrite to remove the “www.”, which also seems to be working fine:

# For removing "www.".  Should be generic, so I don't have to change anything:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Ok, so, dabbling on my own, I can change the old segment 1 and 2 to the new segment 1 and 2 successfully with this:

# Changing location of old blog
Redirect 301 /old-template-group/old-page-template/ /new-template-group/new-page-template/

That works –but, of course, I’m left with the pesky “?”, and I can’t use that redirect function to do anything about it.

So, it seems I have to do more here -possibly with the original rewrite rule!

I would really, really appreciate some help on this! Although I can’t completely do a 301 redirect here because of the “?”, I can get close, and I can at least keep the older links to my page intact (which, I’m assuming search engines would treat more favorably!).

Thank you! -John Christian