trouble with utf-8 chars & apache2 rewrite rules

Question

I see the post validating utf-8 in htaccess rewrite rule and I think that is great, but a more fundamental problem I am having first:

I needed to expand to handle utf-

Answer 1

This is a response to the destroyer's answer but it got too long.

I'm down with URL encoding the unicode cuz it's easy enough to decode it for display. So maybe that's the basic problem. Eventually I'll just use url_encode in php to do this but I thought I'd try an online one just to test things: I went to http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/urlencode/Encode.aspx and tried to encode México and it came out M%c3%a9xico. I went to the site you indicated and tried it and it came out M%E9xico different!! Which is it??? I guess I'd have to accept whatever the php function would actually give me. But both of those has a 9 in it which mean I have to accept digits as well as %. Is that ALL I'd have to include?

I would hope that requests asking for genuine subdirectories would NOT match this rule if that's what you mean by bypassing it, I'd rather they actually render the static pages at the subdirectories. That's why I really want to exclude / which I thought I did. But seems to be matching anything after the / including nested subdirectories and going to the puzzle.php file.

Here is what I tried, but no joy: I used this rule: RewriteRule ^/puzzle/([A-Za-z0-9_%-]+)$ /puzzle.php?g=$1 [NC] as you see I added the % and 0-9 to the group. Do I need to escape the % or something? I read that only \ needs escaping inside square brackets. I hope that's what you mean. Would these be the only additional character you would get by encoding any possible unicode string? then I passed the 2 different url encoded version of Mexico in. For M%E9xico I am now getting 404 and this message: The requested URL /puzzle/México was not found on this server. For M%c3%a9xico I am now getting this message on the 404: The requested URL /puzzle/México was not found on this server. And for non existent subdirectories it is now giving 404 as it should. So now it is just the rewrite rule not working. That's progress. Also the rewrite log started getting stuff in it: Here is some. I will google for how to read these logs:

kidd108d-mac3:logs tpdick$ cat puzzles.httpd.rewrite 
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /puzzle/M?xico
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) applying pattern '^/puzzle/([A-Za-z0-9_%-]+)$' to uri '/puzzle/M?xico'
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (1) pass through /puzzle/M?xico
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/M?xico
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] strip per-dir prefix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/M?xico -> puzzle.php/M?xico
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] applying pattern '^(.*)/GeoP-Test/puzzle/(.*)$' to uri 'puzzle.php/M?xico'
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (1) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] pass through /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/M?xico
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] strip per-dir prefix: /Users/tpdick::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /puzzle/México
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) applying pattern '^/puzzle/([A-Za-z0-9_%-]+)$' to uri '/puzzle/México'
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (1) pass through /puzzle/México
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/México
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] strip per-dir prefix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/México -> puzzle.php/México
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] applying pattern '^(.*)/GeoP-Test/puzzle/(.*)$' to uri 'puzzle.php/México'
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (1) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] pass through /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php
::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/México

Now what??