I've been trying so many things today and I am just not winning. I have one file in my site which got created by accident with a special character in it. As a result Googlebot has stopped crawling for 3 weeks now and Webmaster tools / Search console keeps notifying me and wanting to retest the url.

All I want to achieve is to configure Nginx to match the following requests and redirect them to the correct location but regex has me stumped on this one.

The unencoded URL string is:

`/historical-rainfall-trends-south-africa-1921â€“2015.pdf`

The encoded URL string is:

`/historical-rainfall-trends-south-africa-1921%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%80%9C2015.pdf`

How can I get a location match for these?

**UPDATE:**

Still losing my mind, nothing I have tried is working. 
I get a match with this regex here - <https://regex101.com/r/3Lk2zr/3> 

but then using this 

`location ~ /.*[^\x00-\x7F]+.* {
 return 444;
 }` 

still gives me a 404 and not a 444

Likewise I get a match with this - <https://regex101.com/r/80KWJ8/1>
But then

`location ~ /.*([^?]*)\%(.*)$ {
 return 444;
 }`

Gives 404 and not 444 

Also tried this but still no work. Sourced from: <https://serverfault.com/questions/656096/rewriting-ascii-percent-encoded-locations-to-their-utf-8-encoded-equivalent>

`location ~* (*UTF8).*([^?]*)\%(.*)$ {
return 444;
}`

`location ~* (*UTF8).*[^\x00-\x7F]+.* {
return 444;
}`

**Temporary Solution**

Thanks to @funilrys and also this [How do I redirect all requests that contains a certain string to 404 in nginx?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17221408/how-do-i-redirect-all-requests-that-contains-a-certain-string-to-404-in-nginx)

This works now 100%

`location /resources {
 expires 3h; 
 add_header Cache-Control 'must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=10800';
 location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {
 expires 3h;
 add_header Cache-Control 'must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=10800';
 }
 location ~* \.(pdf)$ {
 expires 30d;
 add_header Cache-Control 'must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=2592000';
 if ($request_uri ~ .*%.*) { return 301 https://example.com/resources/weather-documents/historical-rainfall-trends-south-africa_1921_2015.pdf; }
 if ($request_uri ~ .*[^\x00-\x7F]+.*) { return 301 https://example.com/resources/weather-documents/historical-rainfall-trends-south-africa_1921_2015.pdf; }
 }`