Apache RewriteRule - Rewriting URLs With Already Encoded QueryStrings

Recently we renamed a URL which was publically available. The system uses Apache httpd, so it was quiet easy to create a RewriteRule:

RewriteRule ^/oldname/(.*) /newname/$1 [R,L]

Unfortunately that didn’t work as expected. A URL like myserver/oldname?myprop=name with spaces will be encoded to myserver/oldname?myprop=name%20with%20spaces. With the above RewriteRule the rewritten URL will be myserver/oldname?myprop=name%2520with%2520spaces. It got encoded two times!.

To fix this, you need the right keywords and Google. Searching for mod_rewrite url encode revealed that adding the NE flag (for No Encoding) does the trick:

RewriteRule ^/oldname/(.*) /newname/$1 [R,NE,L]