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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T05:19:47+00:00

This is the first time I came across this thing, and I’ve been working

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This is the first time I came across this thing, and I’ve been working with Apache for about 13 years now.

I have this rewrite rule:

RewriteRule ^/tagged/(.*)/$ /index.php?a=tagged&tags=$1

Very simple, right?
Here is the deal: if the value of the “tag” contains urlencoded chars – they are just lost in translation. Gone, bye-bye!?

If I enter url like this: /tagged/c%2B%2B/ which is the wight way to urlencode c++
then index.php receives the value of tags=c
where did my ++ go?

When I enter c%2B%2B directly in the url like this:
/index.php?a=tagged&tags=c%2B%2B then everything if fine, happily finding my posts tagged c++

Is this a known issue? What’s the workaround?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I had a problem very similar to this once. Here is the link I used to solve it. The issue is that, as the link suggests, by the time mod_rewrite performs its rules Apache has already unescaped the URL and so when you rewrite the URL to the PHP script, PHP will interpret the +’s as spaces.

    Edit: the post has been updated:

    Update 24th August 2009: Apache 2.2.12 includes a B flag to RewriteRule that is meant to be used for this issue. It was introduced in 2.2.7, but broken until 2.2.12, if I read the changelog correctly. Thanks to Michael Stillwell for letting me know.

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