Redirecting urls with special characters

[getoffmyisland]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/4518100.htm [webmasterworld.com] by incredibill - 2:52 pm on Nov 17, 2012 (PST -8)

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and how would you redirect a url like this:

www.example.com/our-work/%ourworkcategories%/ (Bad request)

to:

example.com/our-work/

[phranque]

what have you tried?

[getoffmyisland]

I tried this, but it only works for /%20 or spaces

eg. when you want to redirect something like this:

www.example.com/our%20work

example:
Redirect 301 "/our work" "http://www.example.com/our-work"

but this doesn't work for bad requests like below.
www.example.com/our-work/%ourworkcategories%/

any help would be appreciated.

[phranque]

you could probably get this working with the RedirectMatch Directive:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectmatch

however i would suggest using mod_rewrite instead of mod_alias.

mod_rewrite - Apache HTTP Server:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html [httpd.apache.org]

[lucy24]

You will probably need to use mod_rewrite for the mechanical part. But the first thing you need to do is figure out exactly what bad URLs are involved, and where they are coming from.

If they are bogus URLs --ones that you didn't make yourself, and didn't come from typos on a site you like-- you don't have to redirect them at all. Let them go to a well-earned 404.