htaccess rewrite to file with a hash (#) in it's name filename

Question

I'm moving an old site into an /archive sub directory of a the new website. The site is all HTML has lots of fully qualified URL to when it wasn't in the archive folder (e.g. (http://domain.com/pictures/home.html). This is fine as I have rewritten any unfound files to the /archive directory.

The problem is... a lot of these fully qualified URLs have # in the filename e.g. http://domain.com/pictures/category#001.html. These are then linked to as http://domain.com/pictures/category%23001.html. When the rewrite is applied to these URLs, the server doesn't find the file giving a 404 error, with the path truncated at the %23 (e.g. '/archive/pictures/category was not found on this server.')

I've tried using the [B] flag, which still gives the 404 error but the file path it gives does exist (e.g '/archive/pictures/category#001.html was not found on this server.').

If I navigate directly to the file in the archive directory using the %23 in the URL(e.g. http://domain.com/archive/pictures/category%23001.html) then the everything works fine. The only issue is when adding the /archive directory through the RewriteRule

The rule is simply this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /archive/$1 [B,L,QSA]

I've also tried replacing the rule with this:

RewriteRule (.*) /archive/%{REQUEST_URI} [B,L,QSA]

But it has the same issue.

Thanks for reading this far!

Answer 1

In the end the only way I could get the server to go to the file was to redirect to it, instead of rewriting the URL, using the following code (R=302 flag added).

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /archive/$1 [R=302,B,L,QSA]

Answer 2

You need to use NE flag here (which avoids escaping):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ((?!archive/).*) /archive/$1 [NE,L,NC]