How to mod rewrite unicode byte sequence for the multibyte hyphen character

.htaccessmod-rewrite

We have case where some adobe pdf files format the hyphen character as %E2%80%90. See http://forums.adobe.com/message/2807241 this is caused by the Calibri font I guess.

So these pdf files have been released and the links don't work So I thought mod rewrite would come to the rescue.

I followed this post here mod_ReWrite to remove part of a URL but I can't seem to search for the % characters according to this question.

Is there anything else I can do?

Here is the rewrite rule I want to use:

RewriteRule ^foo%(.+)bar  /foo-bar [L,R=301]

I also tried this and it doesn't work

RewriteRule ^foo%E2%80%90bar  /foo-bar [L,R=301]

Any Ideas?

Best Answer

Using the answer from this question, I was able to come up with this .htaccess rule which fixed my own unicode-hyphen-links-in-pdfs problem:

# for janky pdfs with links using unicode hyphens
RewriteRule ^([^_]*)\x25E2\x2580\x2590([^_]*_.*) $1-$2 [N]
RewriteRule ^([^_]*)\x25E2\x2580\x2590([^_]*)$ /$1-$2 [L,R=301]

Related Solutions

Max length of url 257 characters for mod_rewrite

You are running into a limitation of the underlying file system.

Take a look at File System Limits. You will see that most have a Maximum filename length of 255 bytes. Thus, when apache and/or your rewrite rule checks if the file exists an error is returned to apache by the operating system.

With Apache, if you put rules such as this in the .htaccess file, it's too late to work around the problem. Apache will have already attempted to stat the long filename thus throwing the file system error '(36)File name too long', returning a 403 error.

I see two options:

Change the URL format of your application to a max of 255 characters between each slash.
Move the Rewrite rules into the apache virtual host config and remove the REQUEST_FILENAME.

How to change mod_rewrite to avoid {REQUEST_FILENAME} in order to get around 255 character URL limit

The three lines below tell Apache to check the filesystem to see if the file exists.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [OR]

The first one means "if the URI is not a directory". The second one means "if the URI is not a link". The third one means "if the URI is not a file".

If you remove or comment out those lines, Apache will apply the rewrite below to every file that doesn't end in ".html" or ".nl" and will not check the file system to see if the file exists first.

There is a purpose to the three lines above. They are there so that if you add an actual file, directory or symlink into your document root and someone requests that file, directory or symlink, Apache will process it as normal and not do the rewrite. If you know that you will never add actual files into the document root then you can safely comment those out without any side effects.

A potentially better change would be to add a new rule above the three lines like this:

RewriteRule (.*[^/]{255}.*) index.cgi?$1 [L,QSA]

This will intercept any URIs that have a single string of more than 255 characters between slashes and send them straight to the rewrite without checking the filesystem. The [L] option ensures that Apache doesn't check any more rules if it matches this one. There is no danger of intercepting URIs that would have mapped to actual files because URIs that match this regex will not be valid file paths.

Update:

A regex that matches any URI that is at least 255 characters long.

RewriteRule (.{255}) index.cgi?$1 [L,QSA]

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Max length of url 257 characters for mod_rewrite

How to change mod_rewrite to avoid {REQUEST_FILENAME} in order to get around 255 character URL limit

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