I have a website linking to mine with a really badly formed URL: http://my-example.com/<br />. It looks like the developer of the site linking to mine has messed up their coding and has let a line break tag end up in the middle of href attribute of the link.
I've not had problems with redirecting URLs with non-alphanumeric characters, the only issues is the space in the <br />.
The Redirect line is:
Redirect 301 category-name/<br /> http://example.com/new-url
The space in the <br /> will be mis-interpreted by the server as the delimiter between the request URL and new URL.
Is there a way I can make the space in <br /> be treated as part of the URL, similar to how the backslash works in RegEx, or do I need to take a different approach to this?
The url leads to a dead page, so needs to be redirected nonetheless.
I tried looking at: Remove Characters from URL with htaccess and Remove Characters from URL with htaccess along with a few others but these don't seem to help, particularly the second not solving the issues with spaces in the URLs.
You can use RedirectMatch and then use \s for matching space:
RedirectMatch 301 "category-name/<br\s/>" http://example.com/new-url