Embedded & in URL and interaction with rewrite

Apache 1.33 on Solaris 10.

I have a rewrite rule that takes
http://<hostname>/countrybrowse_<countryname> and rewrites it to
/cgi/countrybrowse.pl?country=<countryname>. Unfortunately, this does
not work as desired if the countryname contains an ampersand.

http://<hostname>/countrybrowse_Antigua%20%26%20Barbuda becomes
/cgi/countrybrowse.pl?country=Antigua & Barbuda. This query string is
not parsed as desired.
http://<hostname>/countrybrowse.pl?country=Antigua%20%26%20Barbuda is
parsed correctly.

I turned on logging and see that the string %20%26%20 is unencoded
before the rewrite rules are applied.

I'd like to avoid a duplicate set of rules that test for the existence
of ' & ' in the original URL and parse it differently.

Is there a way to handle this so the result of the rewrite is
/cgi/countrybrowse.pl?country=Antigua%20%26%20Barbuda? Is that what I want?

Thanks,
Jim

Jim Hayter wrote:
> Is there a way to handle this so the result of the rewrite is
> /cgi/countrybrowse.pl?country=Antigua%20%26%20Barbuda? Is that what I
> want?

Double encoding. %25%26
The '&' is a valid character in the URL, so it isn't escaped again in
the substitution. Another way is that you analyze the full ENV
QUERY_STRING (country=Antigua & Barbuda) in your script but not just the
variable "country".
You might also write a RewriteMap for ampersand escaping.

--
Robert