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

Answer 1

In Apache, AllowEncodedSlashes On would prevent the request from being immediately rejected with a 404.

Just another idea on how to fix this.

Answer 2

You can use %2F if using it this way:
?param1=value1&param2=value%2Fvalue

but if you use /param1=value1/param2=value%2Fvalue it will throw an error.

Answer 3

$encoded_url = str_replace('%2F', '/', urlencode($url));

Answer 4

I use javascript encodeURI() function for the URL part that has forward slashes that should be seen as characters instead of http address. Eg:

"/api/activites/" + encodeURI("?categorie=assemblage&nom=Manipulation/Finition")

see http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

Answer 5

I had the same problem with slash in url get param, in my case following php code works:

$value = "hello/world"
$value = str_replace('/', '/', $value;?>
$value = urlencode($value);?>
# $value is now hello%26%2347%3Bworld

I first replace the slash by html entity and then I do the url encoding.

Answer 6

On my hosting account this problem was caused by a ModSecurity rule that was set for all accounts automatically. Upon my reporting this problem, their admin quickly removed this rule for my account.