Server issue adding backslash to end of RSS url breaks it

[dethfire]

Affected version

1.5.21

This is troublesome when apache redirects automatically add in the backslash to your final destination

ex.

RewriteRule ^external.php* https://www.physicsforums.com/forums/-/index.rss [R=301,L]

turns into

https://www.physicsforums.com/forums/-/index.rss/

and will break

 

[PaulB]

That doesn't look right at all. Even the regex is invalid. Aren't you looking for something more like this?

RewriteRule ^/external\.php$ /forums/-/index.rss [R=301,L]

• * probably doesn't work the way you think; it repeats the previous character 0 or more times, so external\.php* would match would match external.ph, external.php, external.phpppp, etc.
• . is a wildcard matching any non-line-breaking character, so it needs to be escaped with a backslash
• While Apache historically allowed matching without a leading slash, for consistency, it should be used
• $ matches the end of the URI. RewriteRule doesn't match against querystrings, so you can omit the wildcard at the end.
• You probably don't want a fully-qualified URL in your redirect.

If it's still not working, you probably have other rules that are messing it up. Paste your whole .htaccess and I'll try to help.

 

[dethfire]

That doesn't look right at all. Even the regex is invalid. Aren't you looking for something more like this?

Thanks for your help and I will look into your suggestions. Amazingly it does work though. But your suggestions do not address the issue and that is apache adds a backslash to index.rss/ and then the rss page breaks.

 

[PaulB]

But your suggestions do not address the issue and that is apache adds a backslash to index.rss/ and then the rss page breaks.

I figured. It sounds like you might have a variety of inconsistencies in your .htaccess. If you post it here, I can try to do a little cleanup for you.

 

[Chris D]

You would need to address whatever issue is adding the trailing slash. The slash changes the meaning of the URL to the route system.