.htaccess regex url redirection

Question

I'm looking for a regular expression for a .htaccess file where I can redirect one URL to another.

URL1: /dir/an-article-title-222

URL2: /dir/222/an-article-title

I would like URL1 to 301 redirect to URL2.

In highlevel language, I think I want to tell .htaccess to:

1. Take the digits after the last dash (-)
2. Put those digits before the article name with a trailing slash, i.e. 222/
3. Remove the last dash and digits from the article name

Any thoughts, suggestions, code are welcome!

Answer 1

Try using this rule :

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^dir/([^/]+)-([0-9]+)$ /dir/$2/$1 [L,R=301]

Answer 2

RewriteRule ^/dir/([\w\d-]*)-([\d]+)$/ /dir/$2/$1 [L,R=301]

Try this, keep in mind that an-article-title by this regex allow a-z, 0-9 and -, for more chars edit the the part [\w\d-]