Question

What does the ¦ symbol do in htaccess. I picked up a code from an online forum for htaccess and they use ¦. I’d like to understand what this symbol means in htaccess if there is any difference at all from possibly the pipe symbol |

RewriteEngine on
#
### Disallow Image Hotlinking
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www\.example\.net
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g¦gif¦bmp¦png)$ - [F]
#
### Externally redirect to remove ".php" if the user adds it
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /([^/]+/)*[^.]+\.php(\?[^\ ]*)?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*[^.]+)\.php$ http://www.example.net/$1 [R=301,L]
#
### Externally redirect to remove double slashes
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . http://www.example.net/%1/%2 [R=301,L]
#
### Externally redirect to remove trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://www.example.net/$1 [R=301,L]
#
### Externally redirect non-canonical hostname requests to canonical
### domain (if not already done by one of the preceding rules)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=www.example.net
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.net/$1 [R=301,L]
#
### Internally rewrite requests for URLs which do not resolve
### to physically-existing files or directories to a PHP file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L,QSA]

Answer 1

It certainly isn’t supposed to be there and probably got there as a result of copy&pasting from a source that included the wrong symbol.

To the RegExp library, it will be just another literal character without any special meaning. It will not be treated like a pipe symbol, i.e. it will be similar to writing

RewriteRule \.(jpe?gxgifxbmpxpng)$ - [F]

and it will make the rule useless.

Source: Tested it to make sure.