How to use htaccess to rewrite url to html anchor tag (#)

Question

I have a situation where I want to take the following URL:

/1/john

and have it redirect using Apache's htaccess file to go to

/page.php?id=1&name=john#john

so that it goes to an html anchor with the name of john.

I've found a lot of reference to escaping special characters, and to adding the [NE] flag so that the redirect ignores the # sign, but these don't work. For example, adding [NE,R] means that the URL just appears in the browser address as the original: http://example.com/page.php?id=1&name=john#john.

Answer 1

This is possible using [NE] flag (noescape).

By default, special characters, such as & and ?, for example, will be converted to their hexcode equivalent. Using the [NE] flag prevents that from happening.

More info http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/flags.html#flag_ne

Answer 2

You can in fact do one of these things, but not both.

You can use the [NE] flag to signify to Apache not to escape the '#' character, but for the redirect to work, you have to specify an absolute URL to redirect to, not simply a relative page. Apache cannot do the scrolling of the window down to the anchor for you. But the browser will, if you redirect to an absolute URL.