Question

I need to capture URLs that have any characters that could be encoded. For example +, {space}, [,] etc. I tired doing the following but did not work –

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ^(.*)(\s|\+|\%)+(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /content/my-rewrite-redirect.php [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/content/$1$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://mydomain.com/content/$1 [QSA,L]

(\s|+|\%) – tried this to capture space characters and any character that has been encoded in the URL but it does not capture URLs like – http://mydomain.com/vertical%5B1%5D.jpg

Thansk for your time.

Answer 1

The problem you’re running into is likely that URLs are decoded by Apache before getting to htaccess. You should try instead of searching for encoded characters, to create a regex that searches for any characters that WOULD BE URL-encoded.

e.g.:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} [!@#$%^&*`~\(\)\\/\[\]\{\}\+]+

Of course, there will be many more characters that qualify… this is just an example