Using .htaccess to redirect with a closing parenthesis

Question

I'm trying to address a problem that seemingly is out of my hands, but hopefully can be fixed with a little .htaccess magic.

Background of the Problem

I have an implementation of MediaWiki that currently uses an .htaccess file to prettify the URL. In the stock MediaWiki configuration without the mod_rewrite, each article in the wiki is normally accessed by visiting:

www.mywebsite.org/index.php?title=George_Clooney_(actor)

With the .htaccess (code below), we're able to clean this up so that the the same page can be accessed by going to:

www.mywebsite.org/George_Clooney_(actor)

This is all working as it should. Internally, there's no problem here.

Summary of the Problem

The problem is a significant portion of my wiki's traffic comes from vBulletin, which I have found has a bug with how it automatically parses URLs in members' posts. When they add the link above, vBulletin parses the url into a BB Code link, but leaves out the ending parenthesis. In fact, their final BB Code generally looks like this:

[url]http://www.mywebsite.org/George_Clooney_(actor[/url])

Which is unfortunate, because members don't usually catch it, and then the link sends them to a page that doesn't exist at:

www.mywebsite.org/George_Clooney_(actor

My Question

Is it possible, hopefully through a rewrite rule, to add the closing parenthesis if an unclosed opening parenthesis is detected?

To help, our wiki follows a pretty strict naming format, and I don't foresee any situation where we'd have an article that has an opening parenthesis without a closing parenthesis. In all cases the words in the parentheses are located at the end of the article name. Our article naming convention is always either:

Article_Name or Article_Name_(type)

So, if we get a bad link that tries to visit "www.mywebsite.org/George_Clooney_(actor", I'd like to automatically redirect them to "www.mywebsite.org/George_Clooney_(actor)".

Other possible routes I've considered is coding an article suggestion section of the 404 page. I feel this will be a bit more work, but will be my go-to solution if this htaccess plan doesn't work out.

Here's what I currently have for my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Require Subdomain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mywebsite.org/$1 [L,R=301]

# Pretty URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/index.php [PT,L,QSA]

Any help would be greatly appreciated. htaccess, and the combination of the right regex, is still pretty new and magical to me.

Answer 1

You can use this rule as your very first rule (just below RewriteEngine On line):

RewriteRule ^(.*?\(.*?[^)])$ /$1) [R=301,L,NE]

This is assuming there is only one missing parenthesis in the URL.