mod_rewrite RewriteRule to handle HTML Entities

Question

For some reason, we recieving a bunch of inbound traffic on URLs that contain HTML entities.

E.g.

http://www.ourdomain.com/index.php?key1=value1&am

Answer 1

This should do the trick;

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)&(.*)
RewriteRule .* /index.php?%1&%2 [N,R=301]

This essentially says;

• Is there an & in the query string?
• If yes, match everything before and after it, then sandwich them together with an &
• The N flag in the rule effectively says 'keep doing this until the condition no longer makes a match'

Check out the mod_rewrite documentation, including RewriteCond and rule flags.