Why doesn't this redirect work?

Question

I have some URIs which have been published or shared which I now need to redirect. The old urls take the form:

http://www.mysite.com/!#story/45 and I want to redirect them to http://www.mysite.com/#!story/name-of-the-story

I've tried the following in a .htaccess file (Apache 2.2)

redirect 301 /#!story/45 /#!story/name-of-the-story

OR

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)#!story/45(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /#!story/name-of-the-story [R=301]

But this does not redirect the URL (it just has no effect). The !# syntax is generated by a library we are using called prettyPhoto which writes location hash from javascript :

location.hash = decodeURI('!' + theRel + '/'+story_slug+'/');

Can anyone explain why this wouldn't work or suggest a way round this? I have mod_rewrite enabled.

Answer 1

Not possible. Anchors aren't part of the URI or Query String, so they aren't sent to Apache at all.