Clean URLS with mod rewrite and URL Encoded characters causes 404?
        Posted  
        
            by Richard JP Le Guen
        on Server Fault
        
        See other posts from Server Fault
        
            or by Richard JP Le Guen
        
        
        
        Published on 2010-06-03T17:16:23Z
        Indexed on 
            2010/06/03
            17:26 UTC
        
        
        Read the original article
        Hit count: 334
        
I have a web site using mod_rewrite to get some clean urls and custom 404 pages. My .htaccess file looks like this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?clean_url=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
What puzzles me is that if the URL contains a %2F (url-encoded /) the server seems to force a 404. As an example, http://example.com/category/article would be a normal article, but then http://example.com/category%2farticle gives a server-generated 404 page. (not the custom 404 page)
I wouldn't have expected this... why this is happening? Is there a way around it?
© Server Fault or respective owner