.htaccess Redirect

I have a puzzler ....

I have replaced a website that was formerly done with some sort of CMS package. There were about a thousand ways for the old site to generate links to product pages and some of them just do not make sense.

I have created an .htaccess file to handle redirects and it works fine for 95% of the old URL's but there are some like this:

c5/

that have me stumped.

I have a page on the site called products.php so what happens is it loads the products page content but because all of the links to images, css etc. are relative, it messes the page up substantially because it is looking for the links in the /C5/ directory.

The next one might be C85 or it might be on another page like index.php

I need to know how I can either strip that appended directory name or alternatively use a wild card or something so that if the page products.php is specified in the URL at all it simply redirects to the base page.

I know this has nothing to do with WA but if someone can help I would be quite grateful.

are you sure the site didn't already have an htaccess file which may have had some url rewriting ?

could it exist somewhere other than the root?

not in my experience.

the reason I asked, was the url you posted looked like a it was a rewritten (friendly) url for example using mod_rewrite.

Yes, that is the problem. there was formerly some rewriting going on so these URL's don't exist on the site, they only exist on search engines and because it generates a result (although a bad one) the links remain in the search index.

Very frustrating.

i can't really suggest where to look for the rewriting file.

sorry I couldn't help, hopefully one of the WA guys can help.