410 - gone in htaccess

410 a page with spaces in URL

[joergnw10]

I want to 410 a page in my htaccess that has spaces in the URL. I replaced the spaces with %20, but it always returns a 404.
Other 410's (no spaces in the URL) work fine.
What could be the problem?

[jdMorgan]

Please post an example of the code that doesn't work, with "example.com" as the domain.

Thanks,
Jim

[joergnw10]

Hi Jim, here is the main part of the htacess plus the redirect that won't work. Thanks for your help!

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^Folder%20with%20three%20spaces/page.htm$ - [G]

I tried it with the %20 and with spaces, also with a "\" at the end of the URL, but with no success.

[jdMorgan]

You don't need more than one RewriteEngine on directive in the file -- at the top.

I can't remember which of these will do it, but one of them will:

RewriteRule ^Folder\ with\ three\ spaces/page\.htm$ - [G]
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^Folder\ with\ three\ spaces/page\.htm$
RewriteRule ^Folder - [G]
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^Folder\%20with\%20three\%20spaces/page\.htm$
RewriteRule ^Folder - [G]
#
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /Folder\%20with\%20three\%20spaces/page\.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^Folder - [G]

Also, put the simplest one of these that works above your domain redirect rule -- There's no use redirecting the domain and then returning a 410 for this file.

The URL-paths seen by RewriteRule, by RewriteCond in %{REQUEST_URI}, and by RewriteCond in %{THE_REQUEST} undergo various degrees of un-encoding, from most to least, respectively.

Jim

[joergnw10]

Thanks Jim, the first version is working (so I didn't try the others).
And thanks for the other tips, too!