urlencoded Forward slash is breaking URL

Question

About the system

I have URLs of this format in my project:-

http://project_name/browse_by_exam/type/tutor_search/keyword/class/new_search/1/search_exam/0/search_subject/0

Where keyword/class pair means search with "class" keyword.

I have a common index.php file which executes for every module in the project. There is only a rewrite rule to remove the index.php from URL:-

RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|resources|robots\.txt)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L,QSA]

I am using urlencode() while preparing the search URL and urldecode() while reading the search URL.

Problem

Only the forward slash character is breaking URLs causing 404 page not found error. For example, if I search one/two the URL is

http://project_name/browse_by_exam/type/tutor_search/keyword/one%2Ftwo/new_search/1/search_exam/0/search_subject/0/page_sort/

How do I fix this? I need to keep index.php hidden in the URL. Otherwise, if that was not needed, there would have been no problem with forward slash and I could have used this URL:-

http://project_name/index.php?browse_by_exam/type/tutor_search/keyword/one
%2Ftwo/new_search/1/search_exam/0/search_subject/0

user_10553841 · Answer

Here's my humble opinion. !!!! Don't !!!! change settings on the server to make your parameters work correctly. This is a time bomb waiting to happen someday when you change servers.

The best way I have found is to just convert the parameter to base 64 encoding. So in my case, I'm calling a php service from Angular and passing a parameter that could contain any value.

So my typescript code in the client looks like this:

    private encodeParameter(parm:string){
    if (!parm){
        return null;
    }
    return btoa(parm);
}

And to retrieve the parameter in php:

    $item_name = $request->getAttribute('item_name');
    $item_name = base64_decode($item_name);

user_4931825 · Answer

I solved this by using 2 custom functions like so:

function slash_replace($query){

    return str_replace('/','_', $query);
}

function slash_unreplace($query){

    return str_replace('_','/', $query);
}

So to encode I could call:

rawurlencode(slash_replace($param))

and to decode I could call

slash_unreplace(rawurldecode($param);

Cheers!

urlencoded Forward slash is breaking URL

13 Answers