Rewrite with french accents?

[emalrola]

I have alwyas used rewrite in .htaccess to make more serach-engine-accessible paths.

However, I am now working on an English site where some of the parameters I am rewriting include french words with accents on.

My rewrite just fails miserably... (fine with strings with no accents)

I am doing a php urlencode of the strings, but this doen't seem to have any affect.

my rewrite rule is

#code to rewrite static to dynamic for galleryBig pages
RewriteRule ^galleryBig\_([^/]+)\_([^/]+)\_([^/]+)\.html$ galleryBig.php?filename=$1\.jpg&src=$2&shortDesc=$3 [L]

The href is displayed on IE bottom line as

http://tosh/gallery_big_townMap_Argel%E8s-sur-Mer+town+map.html

I get a 403 error with the following message
You don't have permission to access /galleryBig_townMap_maps_Argelès-sur-Mer+town+Map.html on this server.

It works fine for anything without an accent.

Can anyone help?

Many thanks

Thanks