Manual:Short URL/Allowing for escaped characters in URI

Allowing for escaped characters in URI

It may happen that you only have access to the .htaccess file, and you would like to allow special characters such as + in the article title, and you are using Apache 2.x. LocalSettings.php therefore contains

~/web_root/w/LocalSettings.php

$wgLegalTitleChars .= "+";

while .htaccess contains something like

~/web_root/.htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^wiki$ wiki/Main_Page [R,NC]
RewriteRule ^wiki/$ wiki/Main_Page [R,NC]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /wiki/([^?\ ]+)
RewriteRule ^wiki/(.+)$ /w/index.php?title=%1 [NE,L,QSA] 

The use of RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}... catches the query before Apache and PHP conspire to replace %2B in the URL with a space.