Clean Custom URL for Serach + Custom Taxonomy

Question

I have a custom taxonomy, called filter. All of the following urls lead to the archive.php and should give me at least 1 post.

• /filter/bar works by default, no custom rule needed
• /myCategory/filter/bar works with my own custom rule, nice!

• /search/foo works by my custom rule

• /?s=foo&filter=bar works as expected

• /search/foo/filter/bar BOOM! No entries

Here are my rules:

add_filter("rewrite_rules_array", function($rules) {

    $newRules = array();

    // ... more rules

    $newRules["search/(.+)/?$"] = 'index.php?s=$matches[1]';

    $newRules["search/(.*)/filter/(.*)/?$"] = 'index.php?s=$matches[1]&filter=$matches[2]';

    $merged = array_merge($newRules, $rules);

    return $merged;
});

---

EDIT

Query-Monitor for the desired URL (suche = search in german)

Answer 1

With Slam's kind tip to use query-monitor plugin, I could figure out what the problem was.

Apparently the url /search/foo/filter/bar also fits the "general search" rewrite-rule. Makes sense, thinking about it– (.+) technically matches /foo/filter/bar aswell. So I could improve (.+) by excluding /s?

But I found an easier solution!

In hope "first match wins" I declared the more specific rule before the general rule– and e voila, it worked!

add_filter("rewrite_rules_array", function($rules) {

    $newRules = array();

    // more specific rule first
    $newRules["search/(.*)/filter/(.*)/?$"] = 'index.php?s=$matches[1]&filter=$matches[2]';

    // general rule later
    $newRules["search/(.+)/?$"] = 'index.php?s=$matches[1]';

    $merged = array_merge($newRules, $rules);

    return $merged;
});