welcome to WebmasterWorld, EddNCFC!

better to do that with a single rule - if HTTP_HOST is not exactly www.example.com then redirect to ...

Hi, thank you for the reply. I'm more of an MS guy and am just starting to learn Apache. What would the .htaccess file look like? regards

Hi,

OK, Is this it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !http://www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

the protocol won't appear in the HTTP_HOST environment variable and to make it "not exactly" you want to start and end anchor the pattern and you want to escape the literal periods since a "." in a regular expression mean "any character".
and there's one more little thing - true HTTP/1.0 clients do not send a Hostname header so you must also check for an undefined HTTP_HOST to prevent a redirection loop.
(extended HTTP/1.0 user agents such as googlebot and modern HTTP/1.1 clients will not cause this problem.)
all that means you should use a pattern more like:

!^(www\.example\.com)?$

(which means "defined and not exactly 'www.example.com'")

you might also want to read the section on Modifying the Query String to see if it applies:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewriterule

Thank you for your feedback, OK so it would look like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

assuming you're ok with arbitrary query strings being passed in the redirect...

OK, that's all great, thank you.

Another thing, on the same site I have a WordPress news section with a .htaccess file in the WordPress directory containing:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /news/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /news/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

This does not redirect to the new site and does not convert non www to www. How would I add in a line to point to new site and non www to www and still retain the original redirect?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Two corrections!

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That's the fifth time this code has been asked about in the last 24 hours.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.2.2:

The host subcomponent is case-insensitive.

therefore the [NC] is indicated in the "RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ..." directive.

Thank you, it is now live.