Redirect URLs with a # in .htaccess

Redirect URLs with a # in .htaccess - .htaccess files are extremely useful in many cases for users who either do not have root permissions or for users who simply aren't comfortable in making changes in their web server's configuration file. Trying to debug .htaccess not working isn't always the easiest thing to do, however, hopefully by checking the discuss below mentioned about htaccess, redirects, hash, , .htaccess common problems as well as the troubleshooting tips, you'll have a better grasp on what you may have to modify to get your .htaccess file running smoothly.Problem :

On one of my sites I get 404s because some scripts are fetching all URLs from the start page as raw URLs, so they include the # in the URL. Normal browsers don’t ever send that part to the server, but these scripts do.

This is how a typical requests URL looks like:

/2014/how-to-manage-wordpress-multisite-imports-with-wp-cli/#comments

The # is not URL encoded.

I tried both following methods:

RedirectMatch 301 #comments       /

and

RewriteRule #(.+)$ /? [L,R=301]

Both without success, the rules don’t catch these requests, because the # starts a comment. The referer and the user-agent fields are empty.

What should I do?

Solution :

From the mod_rewrite documentation you need to use the NE (no escape) flag when your rewrite rule has a hash:

RewriteRule #(.+)$ /? [L,R=301,NE]

You commented that the NE flag may only apply to the target URL and not the rewrite pattern. If that is the case, another approach would be to escape the # sign. mod_rewrite supports x style escape sequences. The escape sequence for # would be x23. So your rewrite rule could be:

RewriteRule x23.+$ / [L,R=301]

If you want to test a solution, you can do so with telnet on the command line. Use the command line telnet example.com 80 to open a socket to your webserver. Then make a simple request like this:

GET /#test HTTP/1.0
Host: example.com

Followed by an extra new line.

Additionally, if you would like to do some further testing, give the htaccess tester tool a try. It allows you to specify a certain URL as well as the rules you would like to include and then shows which rules were tested, which ones met the criteria, and which ones were executed.