How do I Redirect Tags from Old Joomla Site to New WordPress Site?

I’ve recently converted a site from Joomla to WordPress. I’m down to polishing up the old Joomla site links that don’t match the WordPress structure, and I’ve run into a problem where I need some help: tags. The Joomla site had close to 500 tags, and all the tags were indexed in Google and other search engines. The Joomla tags links have a structure like “http://mysite.com/components/tag/apples.html” and “http://mysite.com/tags/apples.html” while the WP site tag links look like “http://mysite.com/tag/apples/”.

What I *really* would like to do is have a 301 redirect that points all the old Joomla tags to their equivalents on the new WP site instead of doing several hundred htaccess entries, one for each tag (“Redirect 301 http://mysite.com/components/tag/apples.html http://mysite.com/tag/apples/” works). The tags themselves are the same on both sites, so it’s not a matter of renaming tags or getting tags with different names to match up.

But I can’t figure out how to make the redirect work. I’ve tried doing things like

“Redirect 301 http://mysite.com/components/tag/*.html http://mysite.com/tag/”

or

“Redirect 301 http://mysite.com/components/tag/*.html http://mysite.com/tag/*/”

or http://mysite.com/tag/*/ or http://mysite.com/tag/?/ for the redirect target. None of those work.

Quite frankly I don’t know my way around regex very well, so my trying to find a solution would be mostly an Easter egg hunt where there may or may not even be any Easter eggs. So I’m hoping someone on the WP forum will be able to help me out or point me to a solution.

Thanks for any help,

Susan