How to Redirect to a url containing an anchor (#)?

Question

I need to take standard incoming urls and rewrite redirect them to target specific anchors on a single page (incoming html page name becomes the anchor name). E.g., the rule would be like this:

RewriteRule ^files/([a-zA-Z0-9\-_]+)\.html$ /test.html#$1 [R]

So this url:

http://foo.com/files/bar.html

...would become:

http://foo.com/test.html#bar

The rule itself works fine, but the # character gets encoded in the browser address bar to:

http://foo.com/test.html%23bar

which of course does not work correctly as an anchor. Is there a way in .htaccess to force it not to encode the hash? I also tried escaping it like \# but that makes no difference.

Answer 1

Try the noescape (NE) flag in your rule:

RewriteRule ^files/([a-zA-Z0-9\-_]+)\.html$ /test.html#$1 [NE, R]