Drupal 301 redirects for matching paths without .htaccess

Question

I am using a Drupal site on top of nginx, and would like to be able to redirect a set of pages from an old style url, to a new one, using 301s. The content has already been migrated over to the new urls, but there may be links elsewhere with the old style. How can I achieve 301 redirects for matching paths, to redirect using part of the information from the old url to inject into the new one (namely [timestamp]).

From:

example.org/article/[timestamp]

To:

example.org/article/doi/static-[timestamp]

I know how I would do this with .htaccess, but is there a way to do this in Drupal itself, or a module to achieve this?

Having looked at the docs, I think that

drupal_goto($path = '', array $options = array(), $http_response_code = 301)

May be the best way to go, with a corresponding (pseudocode):

if path == oldpath, 
    drupal_goto(etc.)

Answer 1

Probably the Global Redirect module suits your needs.

You may have to implement the timestamp feature as a new token with a custom module.

Answer 2

In this case, I looked at @Arosboro's suggestion about using Global Redirect. This was a bit more than I actually required, as all I needed was a simple redirect for a particular page. What I did instead was implement a quick module which handled the redirect based on a regex match for the old URL.

function redirect_init() {
    if (isset($_GET['destination'])) {
        $destination = $_GET['destination'];
        unset($_GET['destination']);
    }

    $request_path = redirect_request_path();

    // If the request_path() matches an article, redirect to the new URL
    // for articles.
    if ($request_path) {
        drupal_goto($request_path, array(), 301);
    }
}


function redirect_request_path() {
    $path = ltrim(request_path(), '/');

    if (preg_match('/^article\/\d+$/', $path)) {
    $path_list = explode('/', $path);
    $timestamp = $path_list[1];
        return 'article/doi/10.7244/cmj-' . $timestamp;
    } else {
        return;
    }
}