We have case where some adobe pdf files format the hyphen character as %E2%80%90. See http://forums.adobe.com/message/2807241 this is caused by the Calibri font I guess. So these pdf files have been released and the links don't work So I thought mod rewrite would come to the rescue. I followed this post here mod_ReWrite to remove part of a URL but I can't seem to search for the % characters according to this question. Is there anything else I can do? Here is the rewrite rule I want to use: RewriteRule ^foo%(.+)bar /foo-bar [L,R=301] I also tried this and it doesn't work RewriteRule ^foo%E2%80%90bar /foo-bar [L,R=301] Any Ideas?