title: How do you match percent symbols in rewrite rules?
body: <p>I am redirecting URLs for a website, and have the following URL to match and redirect:</p>
  
  <pre><code>example.com/test-string-%2526-more-string/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I cannot match the %2526 portion of the string - it seems that Apache is treating the percentage symbol as a special character, and escaping it seems to make no difference. Here's the basic rule I'm trying:</p>
  
  <pre><code>RewriteRule ^test-string-\%2526-more-string/?$ /new-location.htm [R=301,L,NC]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>With or without the escaping slash, this rule doesn't fire. I suspect the problem is with how apache processes encoded characters in URLs - %25 translates to a percentage symbol itself, so could Apache be translating "%25" to "%" before running the rule? Or is something else going on?</p>