php - url encoded forward slashes breaking my codeigniter app

Question

i’m trying to create a url string that works like this:

/app/process/example.com/index.html

so in other words,

/app/process/$URL

i then retrieve the url with

$this->uri->segment(3);

the forward slashes in the URL will of course be a problem accessing uri segments, so i’ll go ahead and url encode the URL portion:

/app/process/example.com%2Findex.html

.. but now I just get a 404 saying ...

Not Found

The requested URL /app/process/example.com/index.html was not found on this server. 

it appears that my url encoding of forward slashes breaks CI’s URI parser.

what can i do to get around this problem?

Answer 1

I think the error message you are getting is not from codeigniter but from your web server.

I replicated this using Apache2 without even using CodeIgniter: I created a file index.php, and then accessed index.php/a/b/c - it worked fine. If I then tried to access index.php/a/b/c%2F I got a 404 from Apache.

I solved it by adding to my Apache configuration:

AllowEncodedSlashes On

See the documentation for more information

Once you've done this you might need to fiddle around with $config['permitted_uri_chars'] in codeigniter if it is still not working - you may find the slashes get filtered out