Just wanted to write a quick post about why you might get a "500 Internal Server Error" message after editing your .htaccess file.

This happened to me a few days ago, but i just ignored this message and used some work-around (can’t remember what exactly i did during that time). But i wanted to find the real issue behind this error as it was getting annoying having to encounter it more often.. I was able to pin-point the cause of the problem in matter of a few seconds.

But the weird thing is that i first tried doing a quick search for “500 Internal Server Error caused by editing .htaccess file” on Google; which was a very specific search, but i couldn’t find anything specifically related to my issue. I am sure i would have eventually ended up with a good result, but time was a factor here

So that is the reason behind this post, I’m writing this for future reference and in case anyone else who might stumble upon this issue.

OK, I know; Enough talk. The issue was the character encoding of the file.

I was using the Komodo IDE instead of of my usual Notepad+, I noticed my Komodo was setup to save all files in the UTF-8 character encoding; so i decided to change the file encoding to Western European CP1252, then saved the file again and BOOM! It worked

Please let me know if this helped you

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