'Redirection with special characters in the destination URL

I have what I thought was a very straightforward URL redirection scenario. Visit a simple easy-to-remember mydomain URL and be redirected to the very complicated cloud address.

This is what I have inside an apache2 virtual host.

ServerName clock.mydomain.com   
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ https://sub.example.com/service/#/12345/login/webclock/1 [R=301,NC,L]

The issue is the # in the destination URL. The # is being html encoded as %23 so the browser is looking and not finding https://sub.example.com/service/%23/12345/login/webclock/1

How can I fix this? Everything I am reading is about dealing with special characters in the origin URL, not the destination URL.

apacheredirectvirtualhost


Solution 1:[1]

From the mod_rewrite documentation you need to use the NE (no escape) flag when your rewrite rule has a hash.

ServerName clock.mydomain.com   
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ https://sub.example.com/service/#/12345/login/webclock/1 [R=301,NC,NE,L]

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Stephen Ostermiller

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