erase part of a URL using htaccess rewrite

Question

i need to remove part of Joomla/Virtuemart generated SEF URI using .htaccess the URI represents a menu hierarchy and structured this way:

online-store - inner-store -product-catalog

this is the resulting URI:

www.domain.com/online-store/inner-store/product-catalog

i would like to change it to:

www.domain.com/online-store/product-catalog

thought this might help but its not making any difference

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On    

RewriteRule ^online-store/inner-store/\d+-(.+) /online-store/$1 [R=301,L]

i know its not considered good practice but i can't change the menu structure.

any suggestions ?

Answer 1

This regex \d+-(.+) will match 1 or more digits followed by hyphen followed 1 or more any thing

Try this code instead:

RewriteRule ^(online-store)/inner-store/(.*)$ /$1/$2 [R=301,L,NC]

Make sure this is first rule in your .htaccess and use a different browser to test it to avoid caching issues.