Moving content from dev directory to production server

Question

When developing websites for clients, each developer has all sites under a relative path in his htdocs dir:

• /client1site/
• /client2site/
• /clientsite/ and so on

Most links within the drupal installation, in content or image srcs have to be absolute to this path: /client1site/en/a-nice-article/ in order to work.

But when client 1's site goes to production, links stop to work because now the structure looks like www.client1site.com/en/a-nice-article.

The situation is general, in the sense that you can develop under a path /X/ and have to go to production under a path /Y/.

Can this be solved with an easy way without having to edit all content or image srcs by hand? Can some mod_rewrite wizardry save the day?