htaccess redirect from root to subfolder and then mask the url?

Two things:

Firstly - I have version 2 of a website located in a folder named v2, and I want to redirect any traffic that is NOT a child of the v2 fol开发者_高级运维der, to www.example.com/v2

The old site located in the root was created in iWeb and has a LOT of subfolders and sub-subfolders.

So:

www.example.com/v2 = New site

www.example.com/Page.html

www.example.com/category/Page.html

ww.example.com/category/subcategory/Page.html = All generic examples of what I need to redirect.

Secondly, and I don't know if this is possible, I want to hide /v2/ in the URL, so that visitors will just see www.example.com/page even though they are actually on www.example.com/v2/page

Links are hardcoded to the v2 folder, like so <a href="v2/contact.html">

Any help is MOST appreciated. I've spent hours trying to figure this out, but I'm only just learning about htaccess and regular expressions, and am totally confused.

Thanks so much!

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^v2/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ v2/$1 [L] 

rewrite everything by including v2 before it .

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ v2/$1 [L] 

www.example.com/Page.html should now be processed as /v2/Page.html

You should not include v2/ in the url being sent to the user.

it would then become v2/v2/