Question

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page/?$ page.php [L] 

This ends up matching the url http://www.site.com/page// but internally it acts differently than http://www.site.com/page/ because the stylesheets and images no longer appear properly. Am I doing something wrong or is this just something I need to deal with if I don’t want to go through a lot of trouble?

To me it looks like it should only match http://www.site.com/page or http://www.site.com/page/

Answer 1

Apache strips the empty path segment. So /path// is treated as /path/. But your browser doesn’t so relative URLs are resolved using /path//.

If you want to remove the multiple slashes, you can use the following rule:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /(([^/\ ]+/)*)/+([^\ ]*) RewriteRule ^ /%1%3 [L,R=301] 

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Explaination

Despite Apache removes empty path segments internal, the THE_REQUEST environment variable (holding the HTTP request line) stays untouched. So we can use this value to check for multiple slashes.

• ^[A-Z]+\ / matches the request method, the following space and the first slash character of the URI path.
• (([^/\ ]+/)*) matches all following non-empty path segments (foo/, foo/bar/, foo/bar/baz/, etc.) or nothing, if there are none.
• /+ matches the empty path segments as the character before this slash is always another slash (see the expressions before).
• ([^\ ]*) matches the rest of the URI (that may contain further empty path segments).

Example: Let’s say we request http://example.com/foo/bar//baz, the request line will look like this:

GET /foo/bar//baz HTTP/1.1 

The pattern would then match as follows:

0: GET /foo/bar//baz 1: foo/bar/ 2: bar/ 3: baz 

So the requested path /foo/bar//baz would be redirected to /foo/bar/baz (/%1%3).