htaccess rewrite rule, parameter with unicode letters - apache

Question

I have tried to follow many answer in the site, without success.
I am trying to rewrite:
domain.com/articles/<author>
To:
domain.com/articles/index.php?author=<author>
My current rule is:
RewriteRule ^(\w*)$ /articles/index.php?author=$1 [B]
That works with letters or numbers, but not with unicode charachters like א and ".
For א, i am getting the following error:
Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL
manually please check your spelling and try again.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 404
localhost Apache/2.4.23 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.2h PHP/7.0.9
And for ":
Access forbidden!
You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either
read-protected or not readable by the server.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 403
localhost Apache/2.4.23 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.2h PHP/7.0.9
And i need them both.
EDIT:
After reading #user82217 comment i have tried again (.*) regex, this time with the END flag like this:
RewriteRule (.*) /articles/index.php?author=$1 [END]
Now א case is being interpreted well. But " case still gives the same error (Access Forbidden).
#user82217 has suggested to investigate the log. For the " case the log is:
Cannot map GET /articles/%22 HTTP/1.1 to file
Conclusion:
As #user82217 said in a comment, It appears that under Windows OS an address with " char is considered an illegal file to serve, although the address isn't a file at all.
So i gave up the " case for now. Will glad to hear if there is a way to get around that.

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^(\w*)$ /articles/index.php?author=$1 [B]
If you simply replace your pattern with (.*) then you will get a rewrite-loop (which is your 500 Internal Server Error). You could either make the RewriteRule pattern match everything except slashes:
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ /articles/index.php?author=$1 [B,L]
However, from your examples it's not clear where your .htaccess file is located. The above assumes it is in the /articles subdirectory.
Alternatively, you could check the query string and only process the directive if the query string is empty:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) /articles/index.php?author=$1 [B,L]
But " case still gives the same error (Access Forbidden).
UPDATE: Ah, this is probably a more fundamental error and is probably a limitation of the OS (are you using Windows?). The " character is not a valid filename character. Apache is unable to map this to a valid filename which would appear to result in a system generated 403 Forbidden.

Answer 2

For the double quotes issue:
The " character is not a valid filename character like #MrWhite said.
#Deadooshka stated in his comment that it cannot be done in .htaccess context.
I think he is right.
#Deadooshka also said it can be done in the <]VirtualHost[> context. However, in my development server i don't use <]VirtualHost[> context.
So the solution was to put the rewrite rule under the global context of Apache's config file (in my case: C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf) like this:
# <<< existing line >>>
DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs"
# <<< existing line >>>
# <<< solution >>>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /articles/(\w*)$ /articles/index.php?author=$1 [B]
# <<< solution >>>