Comments on: mod_rewrite + mod_proxy + spaces in URI = boom!

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:55:50 +0000

Thank you for this article. I found it very helpful.

By: rengler

rengler — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:49:21 +0000

I’m pretty sure this is the only website anywhere that details how to fix this problem. Thank you very much.

Separately, do you have any resources online that you consult for other tricks using mod_rewrite? I’m having trouble writing a rule allowing Splunk on the side of my website.

Best…

By: Bloutiouf

Bloutiouf — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:20:53 +0000

In fact the issue is solvable if you add a PHP file on your first server. Let me explain:

My site use “Search Engine Optimization” uri, i.e. “http://site/foo/barr” and not “http://site/index.php?firstarg=foo&secondarg=bar”. You can easily turn the second syntax into the first one. I mainly use the .htaccess file Joomla provides :

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1

In the file “index.php”, you can access to the extra path with the variable $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']. For the example it would look like “/foo/bar”. This string is not escaped. But you can do with the function urlencode. Then, but I didn’t try, you can either put header(‘Location: http://newserveur‘.urlencode($_SERVER['PATH_INFO'])) or put readfile(‘http://newserveur’.urlencode($_SERVER['PATH_INFO'])), I don’t guess which is the correct, I think it depends if your SVN software understands header requests.

Here is. I hope this works :)

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:10:28 +0000

That is nicely explained. Of course I only have access to .htaccess so I couldn’t actually use it. I guess the issue is insolvable with only htaccess files.