how to rewrite %20 in .htaccess

Question

I need to perform an equivalent rewrite to:

RewriteRule ^/this%20file.pdf http://www.example.com/

How do I handle the %20?

I have tried

RewriteRule ^/this\%20file.pdf http://www.example.com/

and

RewriteRule ^/this(\s|%20)file.pdf http://www.example.com/

but these have not worked.

The website is part of a Wordpress network, so it doesn't have it's own directory or subdomain where I can place a .htaccess file containing redirects; it's a virtual subdomain with domain mapping. So, the Wordpress .htaccess rewriterule is preceeded by

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]

Answer 1

You shouldn't need to use percent encoding/hexcode in mod_rewrite parameters since mod_rewrite will encode special characters (?, #, , &, etc.) by default. To write a space in the rewrite pattern, use \s or just escape the space with a backslash (\). Whether space gets encoded as %20 or + depends on whether it's part of the query string or the URI.

So your rule should look like this:

RewriteRule ^/this\ file.pdf http://www.example.com/

Or:

RewriteRule ^/this\sfile.pdf http://www.example.com/

If you do want to manually specify the URI encoding, then you need to use the NE (noescape) flag to tell mod_rewrite not to escape special characters.

Otherwise, /this%20file.pdf gets treated as /this%2520file.pdf, as the % will be encoded as %25.

Answer 2

RewriteRule ^/this%20file.pdf http://www.example.com/

The URL-path matched by the RewriteRule pattern (regex) is already %-decoded. So, to match an encoded space (ie. %20) in the request you match against a literal space in the regex.

(Aside: If you try to match a literal %20 here then you are matching against a doubly-encoded space, ie. %2520, in the requested URL-path.)

As mentioned in @Lèsemajesté answer, you can do this in the regex itself by either backslash-escaping the space ie. \ , or using the \s shorthand character class to match any whitespace character.

OR, you can simply surround the argument in double-quotes and use a literal un-escaped space. For example:

RewriteRule "^/?this file\.pdf" http://www.example.com/

The double-quotes are an Apache mechanism for when arguments contain spaces, since spaces are argument delimiters in Apache config files.

NB: Since we are dealing with .htaccess here you should also remove (or make optional - as I have done above) the slash prefix on the URL-path matched by the RewriteRule pattern. In a directory context (ie. .htaccess) the URL-path matched by the RewriteRule pattern does not start with a slash.