Can't redirect with .htaccess

Question

On the end of my rope here, nothing that should be working is.

I'm new to website building and I noticed my visitors were trying to access certain pages and getting forbidden warnings eg: trying www.test.com/test you give a 403 error.

All I want to do is make it so www.test.com/test would redirect it to a test.html file in a directory right above it.

Tried doing it with .htaccess in the root directory with nothing but

redirect /test www.test.com/test.html

Doesn't work. Just gives me the 403 error.

Tried a simple index.html file to redirect with nothing but

<?php
header('Location: www.test.com/test.html');
die();
?>

But that doesn't work either.

Really not sure why both of these outright refuse to work.

Answer 1

header parameter should be wrapped in double quotes. like

header("Location: www.test.com/test.html"); 
exit(); 

also make sure your server recognizes your file extention as a php file if its not having a .php file extension. You can add the custom extensions by editing httpd.conf.

Answer 2

If I am interpreting correctly your ultimate intention, you don't need to use redirections, just try this in your .htaccess :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

This way, every requested URL will be interpreted as if it was the same request plus .html .

Although you could do it via a redirection, it is not necessary.

So once you have that code in your .htaccess you just need to have the file test.html in your root, and www.test.com/test will serve the www.test.com/test.html page.