What happens when i put a slash (/) after a .php u

Question

I have a simple question, but could not find the answer anywhere

say I have a site "mysite.com". I can access the index page by either typing "mysite.com" or "mysite.com/index.php". This works fine... however, when i try to go to "mysite.com/index.php/" the page loads, but not correctly. what is exactly happening? I would think it should return a 404 error, since index.php would be treated as a (non existing) directory (i.e. i would think it would try to find "mysite.com/index.php/index.php"). This clearly isn't the case. Can someone please tell me what exactly is happening? This is also true when you put anything after the slash, i.e. "mysite.com/index.php/hello"

thanks.

Answer 1

This is due to your Apache environmental variable called PATH_INFO.

PATH_INFO

Actually, PATH_INFO is related to the Apache Web Server serving PHP pages and not PHP per-say.

PATH_INFO is an environment variable set by Apache when the AcceptPathInfo directive is turned on. It will contain trailing pathname information that follows an actual filename (or non-existent file in an existing directory) will be accepted or rejected. Environment variables are then passed on to the Apache/CGI module in charge of rendering the page.

The variable is accessible in PHP using $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].

For example, assume the location /test/ points to a directory that contains only the single file here.html. Then requests for /test/here.html/more and /test/nothere.html/more both collect /more as PATH_INFO.

This answer is copied from Andrew Moore Link to original answer

Answer 2

When the server notices that a "directory" in the URL is a script rather than an actual directory, it runs the script. The remaining components of the path in the URL are put in the PHP variable $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].