regex rewrite problem

[mpratt]

Hello,

I am new to this forum. Glad it exists. Thanks for that. I have a
production website that uses nginx 0.8.53 reverse proxy in front of
apache. I actually had little problem setting that up, but this simple
regex is giving me a headache.

For some reason, I am unable to take a URI like
example.com/manufacturers/metlox/0?page=13 and change it to
example.com/manufacturers/m   It seems like the curly braces aren’t
working.

I’ve tried the following without results:

location ~* /manufacturers/ {
        rewrite "^/manufacturers/(.{1})/(.*)$"
/manufacturer/directory/$1 redirect;
        }
location ~* /manufacturers/ {
        rewrite "^/manufacturers/([a-z] {1})/(.*)$"
/manufacturer/directory/$1 redirect;
        }

location ~* /manufacturers/ {
        rewrite "^/manufacturers/([a-z]?)/(.*)$"
/manufacturer/directory/$1 redirect;
        }

I am fairly new to regex, so maybe this is something simple. What I want
to get is the first letter of first captured word.  I am able to pull
the entire word with (.*) for $1, but not the first letter only. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,221410,221410#msg-221410