Using Chinese Characters With Mod_Rewrite

Question

I'm trying to create a rule using Chinese characters

#RewriteRule ^zh(.*) /中文版$1 [L,R=301]

creates error 500 when i change the file to UTF-8

#RewriteRule ^zh(.*) /%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%89%88$1 [L,R=301]

redirects to /%25E4%25B8%25AD%25E6%2596%2587%25E7%2589%2588 (basically replacing % with %25)

Anybody familiar with this problem?

Answer 1

There is a whole page dedicated to this issue including solutions:

http://www.dracos.co.uk/code/apache-rewrite-problem/ (fyi-noi: Google "apache escape" -> 6th hit)

Answer 2

Using notepad I changed the encoding to "ANSI as UTF-8", rather than UTF-8. This made everything work as expected.