.htaccess and avoiding urlencoding

Question Marks Turning Into %3f

[Beachdog]

I've recently migrated a client from a static e-commerce site using PayPal to an osCommerce solution, and for the sake of search engine ranking I'm trying to use .htaccess to redirect from her static pages from before to the PHP pages of now.

The line in my .htaccess that it causing problems for me is the following:

RedirectMatch permanent /pages/foo_bar_yadda.html /product_info.php?products_id=73

When I go to foo_bar_yadda.html I get my 404 page, as it tried to go to /product_info.php%3fproducts_id=73

I've researched over at the osCommerce site, as well as Googled to a point of unhealthiness.

There are quite a few of these that I need to do, and I'd rather not do redirects within the old pages, as I understand that the search engines don't take too kindly to such shenanigans.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
David

[jdMorgan]

Internally rewrite, do not externally redirect. Library thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

Jim