301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs

[Seamoose]

Hi

I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors.

I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail.

The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result.

If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help.

Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

[Seamoose]

Hey Paul, and thanks for the reply.

This certainly feels like it is helping me close in on the mystery (more likely my knowledge gap!) however, I am getting some odd results. I think maybe I need to wade through all my attempts at 301-ing these troublesome old URLs and see if I have done something weird which might to be blame but anyway, for the record, here is the new mystery:

When I pop in the following:

http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1-_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

I get redirected to

http://www.tesselaars.com/valentines-day-statistics-2013/

I can only figure I must have entered a 301 of this nature, which seems odd as it's a different post, but hey, after five million 301s it is possible!

I will check that out and see if I can get a clean and clear result and report back. Thanks for your help

[ThompsonPaul]

The version with URL entities you posted is almost right, Seamus, but there's a a weird combination of entities around the "hyphen surrounded by two underscores". For some reason, this is showing as %E2%80%93 when it should just be a - (There's no need to encode a hyphen as it's a standard URL character)

Try this as the source URL, with the redirect set as NOT a regular expression:

/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1-_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

I've tested that and it's working on my test install. If it doesn't work for you, there may be an encoding issue on your Windows server that's different from what I see on Linux/Apache.

Lemme know if that works?

Paul

P.S. Here's the Source URL for the second example used in the WordPress Forum post:

/_blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Valentine%27s_Day_Statistics_2013/