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.

Stockpile

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

Selfinsurance

Answer 2

You can 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.

Clastic

To the original poster: indicate an answer as correct to resolve this. – Clastic

Hmm .. with Apache 2.4.25, I'm specify a relative page and still getting an external redirect to an anchor tag. Maybe things have changed since 2013? In a <Directory> section, RewriteBase "/" then RewriteRule ^services/?$ #services [L,R=301,NE] is working for me. Which is nice if I don't have to re-do the rules when converting to https. – Secessionist

Answer 3

What you want to do, can be accomplished with URL rewriting, or, more specifically, URL beautification.

I just quickly found this well explained blog post for you, I hope it can help you out with the learning to rewrite URLs-part.

As for the #-thing (expecting that you now know what I'm talking about), I don't see a problem in passing the same variable to the rewritten URL twice. Like: (notice the last part of the first line)

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$  /$1/$2/#$2 [R]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&subpage=$2

Though, you'll have to escape the #-part, and it seems that it can be done this way:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$  /$1/$2/\%23$2 [R,NE]

BTW, URL rewriting is not that hard (but can become complicated, and I'm not an expert), but Google can help a lot along the way.

Gorged

Hi Sune, thanks for the response. I don't think what I'm trying to do is possible, however. See response on this page from nikc. – Stockpile

Answer 4

You cannot do an internal redirect to an anchor. (Just think about it: how would Apache scroll down to the anchor?) Your link should pointo to /1/john#john. Anchors aren't part of the request uri.

Taking

I'm verifying this in practice and believe you're correct. The browser interprets anchors and scrolls down to the correct point in the page; an Apache redirect is not able to do this because the redirected-to URI isn't passed to the browser. – Stockpile