trouble with utf-8 chars & apache2 rewrite rules

I'd suggest you activate MultiViews and forget mod_rewrite. Add to your apache configuration in the relevant Directory/VirtualHost section:

Options +MultiViews#should already be set to this, but it doesn't hurt:AcceptPathInfo Default

No you can always omit the extensions as long as the client includes the correspondent mime type in its Accept header.

Now a request for /puzzle/whatever will map to /puzzle.php and $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] will be filled with /whatever.

If you want to do it with mod_rewrite it's also possible. The test string for RewriteRule is unescaped (the %xx portions are converted to the actual bytes they represent). You can get the original escaped string using %{REQUEST_URI} or %{THE_REQUEST} (the last one also contains the HTTP method and version).

By convention, web browsers use UTF-8 encoding in URLs. This means that "México" will be urlencoded to M%C2%82xico, not M%82xico, which would be expected if the browsers used ISO-8859-1. Also, [a-zA-Z] will not match é. However, this should work:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/puzzle/[^/]*$RewriteRule ^/puzzle/(.*)$ /puzzle.php?q=$1 [B,L]

You need B to escape the backreference because you're using it in a query string, in which the set of characters that are allowed is smaller than for the rest of the URI.

The thing you should be aware of is that RewriteRule is not unicode aware. Anything other than .* can give (potentially) incorrect results. Even [^/] may not work because the / "character" (read: byte) may be part of a multi-byte character sequence. If RewriteRule were unicode aware, your solution with \w should work.

Since you do not want to match subdirectories, and RewriteRule ^/puzzle/[^/]* is not an option, that check is deferred to a RewriteCond that uses the (escaped) %{REQUEST_URI}.

On...

RewriteRule ^/puzzle/(\w+)$ /puzzle.php?g=$1 [NC]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this mean get requests asking for subdirectories simply bypass this rule?

Also, a lazy way to solve this is to also group in the '%' character. As far as I know, all you're allowed to work with is on any url path is url encoding. Actually, see: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm

I'm sure there are more advanced and better ways to do this, but that should solve your immediate problem.

This is a response to the destroyer's answer but it got too long.

I'm down with URL encoding the unicode cuz it's easy enough to decode it for display. So maybe that's the basic problem. Eventually I'll just use url_encode in php to do this but I thought I'd try an online one just to test things: I went to http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/urlencode/Encode.aspx and tried to encode México and it came out M%c3%a9xico. I went to the site you indicated and tried it and it came out M%E9xico different!! Which is it??? I guess I'd have to accept whatever the php function would actually give me. But both of those has a 9 in it which mean I have to accept digits as well as %. Is that ALL I'd have to include?

I would hope that requests asking for genuine subdirectories would NOT match this rule if that's what you mean by bypassing it, I'd rather they actually render the static pages at the subdirectories. That's why I really want to exclude / which I thought I did. But seems to be matching anything after the / including nested subdirectories and going to the puzzle.php file.

Here is what I tried, but no joy: I used this rule: RewriteRule ^/puzzle/([A-Za-z0-9_%-]+)$ /puzzle.php?g=$1 [NC]as you see I added the % and 0-9 to the group. Do I need to escape the % or something? I read that only \ needs escaping inside square brackets. I hope that's what you mean. Would these be the only additional character you would get by encoding any possible unicode string? then I passed the 2 different url encoded version of Mexico in. For M%E9xico I am now getting 404 and this message:The requested URL /puzzle/México was not found on this server. For M%c3%a9xico I am now getting this message on the 404: The requested URL /puzzle/México was not found on this server. And for non existent subdirectories it is now giving 404 as it should. So now it is just the rewrite rule not working. That's progress. Also the rewrite log started getting stuff in it: Here is some. I will google for how to read these logs:

kidd108d-mac3:logs tpdick$ cat puzzles.httpd.rewrite ::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /puzzle/M?xico::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) applying pattern '^/puzzle/([A-Za-z0-9_%-]+)$' to uri '/puzzle/M?xico'::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (1) pass through /puzzle/M?xico::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/M?xico::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] strip per-dir prefix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/M?xico -> puzzle.php/M?xico::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] applying pattern '^(.*)/GeoP-Test/puzzle/(.*)$' to uri 'puzzle.php/M?xico'::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (1) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] pass through /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/M?xico::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] strip per-dir prefix: /Users/tpdick::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /puzzle/México::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) applying pattern '^/puzzle/([A-Za-z0-9_%-]+)$' to uri '/puzzle/México'::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (1) pass through /puzzle/México::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/México::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] strip per-dir prefix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/México -> puzzle.php/México::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] applying pattern '^(.*)/GeoP-Test/puzzle/(.*)$' to uri 'puzzle.php/México'::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#910858/subreq] (1) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] pass through /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php::1 - - [26/May/2010:15:54:37 --0700] [puzzles.net/sid#886b00][rid#904858/initial] (3) [perdir /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/] add path info postfix: /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php -> /Users/tpdick/Sites/puzzles/puzzle.php/México

Now what??