htaccess Expertise please?

devildriver

I'm trying to deal with a whole heap of old incoming links on a site I've rebuilt. All of the legacy urls use underscores and the new site uses hyphens. So a htaccess rule to redirect seemed like a good option.

Problem is it's mucking up some legacy images with underscores in the file names. How do I exclude certain directories from the rewrite?

Currently using the rule like this:

#1 Redirect rule to convert _ to -
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+(.*?)_+[_-]*(.+?)\sHTTP [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1-%2 [L,NE,R=302]

Thanks.

daymobrew

I don't know the answer but maybe a check whether the file exists might help.

In the WordPress default .htaccess code it has:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

I believe that these check whether the request is for an existing file or directory.
Maybe put these before your lines and see what happens.