This simple extension allows you to redirect urls using the power of regular expressions. To add a redirect, go to chrome://extensions, and click on "Options" next to the Redirector extension. From the options page you can add new redirects, and view/delete existing ones.
For example, you can have all mobile Wikipedia urls to open in desktop mode (this is convered in the tutorial below).
You could also redirect to non-browser schemes to launch external apps. For example,If you want youtube links to open in a desktop video app (such as minitube), you can redirect all youtube urls with a "youtube:" prefix, and then set up a scheme handler on your OS to pass youtube: urls to your player.
Sometimes people send you links to the mobile version of a website. You're on your desktop, and you'd rather see the desktop version. For example, a mobile Wikipedia url looks like this:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
To set up a redirect for mobile Wikipedia urls, enter the following:
From: ^http://(.*?)\.m\.wikipedia\.org/(.*)
To: http://$1.wikipedia.org/$2
Here's a breakdown of the FROM pattern if you're not familiar with regular expressions. When we say "matches", that means the redirect will only trigger if a match occurs.
| Regex | Effect |
|---|---|
| ^ | starts matching at the beginning of the url |
| http:// | matches "http://" |
| (.*). | matches zero or more characters until the next dot and captures it as group $1 |
| m.wikipedia.org/ | matches "m.wikipedia.org/" |
| (.*) | matches the rest of the url and captures it in group 2 |
If the URL matches, group $1 will contain the "en" part of the domain, and group $2 will contain everything after the domain name. So the resulting redirect url in our example will become:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
To learn more about regular expressions, try the interactive tutorial at RegexOne.com.
