htaccess rewrite rule with escaped ampersand in $_GET fails

php .htaccess mod-rewrite escaping rewrite

Ah, okay. Interesting. It seems there is a special solution for keeping that ampersand specifically escaped. Use the [B] flag for Rewriterules.

RewriteRule ^static/(.*)$ /index.php?static=$1 [L,B]

This is supposed to urlencode special characters when interpolating the $1 placeholder. It only works with Apache 2.2 however I believe.

Found a few references:

CodeHunter