Lowercase URLS

causing 500 errors

[delboy1978uk]

Hi everyone!
I have swapped an old site on a cPanel host for a new one written in Zend Framework.

And as always, sods law kicked in and the job spec changed. Since the old sites google results were quite good, he wants the urls to be the same.

But if i browse to site.com/Contact instead of site.com/contact it doesn't work!

My current htaccess is like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule !\.(js|gif|jpg|png|css|txt)$ index.php

which is a typical zend framework .htaccess
I notice the line with NC means no case, but the dash means do not rewrite!
It is a dedicated server so i can access the apache configs

Any ideas?

[g1smd]

Here, the

NC

flag has no effect.

The

(.*)

matches all requests.

The

NC

flag is used when the RegEx pattern is

^page$

and you want to accept any case request. Without the

NC

flag in place, only

example.com/page

would match, but with the

NC

flag added, requests for

example.com/Page

and

example.com/pAgE

would also match.

However, you should not normally use the

NC

flag with a rewrite that directly serves content, use it only with a redirect. You should not allow multiple URLs to access the same content, and that's what the

NC

flag would do when used with a rewrite that serves content.

The solution to your problem is fairly simple. When a request with any upper case characters is received, rewrite (that's rewrite not redirect) the request to a PHP script that uses

strtolower()

to deduce the new URL and the

HEADER

directive to issue a 301 redirect to the new URL. This is now safe, content is now only served at lower case URLs, and the redirect retains traffic asking for upper case URLs.