regex rewrite problem

[Alexander Kolesen]

> 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.
> 

Hello.

Try the following:

location /manufacturers/ {
    location ~ ^/manufacturers/(.) {
        return 301 /manufacturers/$1;
    }
}