Hi devs,

Currenty symfony can create urls containing urlencoded slash (%2F),
which does not work for apache*, it throws right away 404 without even
looking at rewrite rules. This can be seen for example in sfSimpleCMS
plugin, where publich/unpublish/delete actions don't work for slugs
containing /

I don't think urlencoding of slash is necessery:
- symfony will receive decoded slash in either case (in case it's
encoded, AllowEncodedSlashes must be On)
- for parameters that might contain slash, "requirements: { paramname:
'.*'}" is required in routing configuration, and this will "eat" the
rest of the url, be it encoded or not.

I propose this change in controller/sfRouting.class.php - just before
return from generate() function, remove encoding of slash:

    $real_url = str_ireplace('%2F', '/', $real_url);

Any comments on this?

-- Marek

* It's possible to set AllowEncodedSlashes to On, but this setting is
only per server and vhost, and most hosts don't allow changing vhosts
sections.

See also:  [symfony-users] escaping escaping in URLs

--

Ian P. Christian ~ http://pookey.co.uk

I think it's completely unnecessary to escape / characters in URLs. It
is only necessary to escape those characters that are not permissible
in URLs and those characters that have syntactic meaning (especially &
and =).

Rick

On Mar 3, 12:56 pm, "Ian P. Christian" <poo...@pookey.co.uk> wrote:

On Mar 5, 2008, at 6:44 AM, RickB wrote:

If you're not going to fully escape URL parameters, how do you  
represent a slug (or some other value) in a URL with a / in it?

--
Jacob Coby
jc...@portallabs.com

On 5. Mar., 15:28 h., Jacob Coby <jc...@portallabs.com> wrote:

I'm talking about URL without query string, that's everything that
comes before the first "?".

Escaping / there makes apache serve 404 page for any request.

-- Marek

On Mar 5, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Marek wrote:

Ahh, that makes more sense.  It definitely doesn't make sense to  
escape the path.

Jacob Coby
jc...@portallabs.com

On Mar 5, 2:28 pm, Jacob Coby <jc...@portallabs.com> wrote:

Ah! I understand your problem now - you're asking about a RESTful URL
with the request parameters converted to look like a long path.

E.g. /index.php?arg=my/slug would need to be converted to /arg/my/slug
but this raises a problem due to the / character being used to delimit
arguments and values.

The original case (/index.php?arg=my/slug) does not have a problem
with / characters in parameters - it's fully legit in URLs to do
this.  The problem only arises because of converting the request
parameters to look like a long URL, in which the / character takes on
a new meaning as the element delimiter (instead of ? and &).

I have some suggestions for what they're worth: either

1. escape the / as %2F
2. convert the / to \ for this purpose only (which would be a
reasonable thing to do - backslashes don't have any formal meaning in
URLs - however this is likely not to work in IE, which treats \ and /
as equivalent in spite of the standard definition of a URL).
3. don't use long URLs but go back to parameter lists (eg. /index.php?
arg=my/slug) when this is a problem.

I favour 3.
Rick

The problem is a common one. Symfony needs to URL-encode the parameters, so
that blank spaces in parameters do not make invalid URLs. For instance, it
is possible to call:

url_for('foo/bar/msg=hello, world!')

And you do need urlencoding for this to work. If you look at the way the
routing works, you will also see that it would complexify the code quite a
lot to allow users to define a per-parameter encoding option.

As for the / being turned into a %2F because of that, a common workaround is
to dedicate a special helper to build the links containing a path. Look at
what was done in sfSimpleCMSPlugin:

function link_to_with_path($text, $uri, $options = array())
{
  return str_replace('%2F', '/', link_to($text, $uri, $options));

Hope this helps,

françois

2008/3/10, RickB <rick.be...@gmail.com>:

hay man you can do this  this wrong  return str_replace('%2F', '/',
link_to($text, $uri, $options)); the right code is link_to('text','/
company/index?company_id='.$company->getId().'&tab=news'

Do you realise who your post was addressing? ;)
That was Francois, of... symfony fame :P

Anyway, you're wrong, please read the whole thread before posting next
time.  To help you understand, the problem is when one of your params
contains a '/' itself

Kind Regards,

Ian