How to redirect a URL containing smartquotes via .htaccess?

Question

Is there a way to redirect a URL containing smart quotes via .htaccess? I\'m using the following rules. Only the last one seems to work:

RewriteRule ^8-%E2%80%9C         


        

Answer 1

You are right, it's slipping passed the rules you have provided.

The reason is because the unicode characters represented by the %E2%80%9C and %E2%80%9D (aka microsoft smartquotes) have already been turned into their unicode representation within Apache. As such you need to properly match the bytestream representing those characters within apache.

In order to properly redirect urls such as this:

http://www.example.com/8-%E2%80%9Crules%E2%80%9D-for-social-advertising

You would use a rule like this:

http://www.example.com/8-\xE2\x80\x9Crules\xE2\x80\x9D-for-social-advertising