Question

I have the following code in my .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^thumbnail/(.*).png thumbnail.php?url=$1 [NC]

And what that does is it turns

http://mydomain.com/thumbnail.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F

Into

http://www.mydomain.com/thumbnail/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2F.png

But when I echo out the url variable in the thumbnail.php file it returns

http:/www.example.com/ NOT http://www.example.com/

Where did the other / go?

Answer 1

Because the http://www.example.com/ is part of the URI path (as opposed to being part of the query string), apache automatically normalizes the path, thus removing multiple consecutive slashes. For example, if you tried to go to:

http://www.mydomain.com/thumbnail/foo//////////////bar.png

And then print out the value of url, you’d get foo/bar.png because before the URI even gets to mod_rewrite in the processing pipeline, the extra slashes are cleaned out.

Alternatively, you could remove the http:// part and add that in the rewrite:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^thumbnail/(.*).png thumbnail.php?url=http://$1 [NC]

Then your url would just be:

http://www.mydomain.com/thumbnail/www.example.com%2F.png

And when you print out the value of url, you’d get http://www.example.com/.png