i am using wamp on my local machine

in the .htaccess file i have the following
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
Options +FollowSymLinks

ErrorDocument 400 http://localhost/badrequest.html
ErrorDocument 403 http://localhost/forbidden.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://localhost/pagenotfound.html

in the url if a type special % character i get the following 400 error

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.


when i type * special character in the url i get a 403 error
You don't have permission to access /folder/test*test on this server.

as i already have the 400 and 403 defined in .htaccess file why is the browser not able to display the html files i have created when a 400 and 403 error occurs and the these 2 html files are in the root directory

please advice.

thanks

You should not specify http and hostname in errordocument directive, simply /badrequest.html is quite enough since it is a file in your webserver's address space.