Allowing colon : in rewrite rule?

[hiccupsheadache]

Hi guys,

for some reason - I cannot get my htaccess rewrite to allow colons : - in my urls...

I have this:

# Stop if it's a request to an existing file.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [L]

# Redirect all requests to the index page

RewriteRule (.*) page.php [NE,L,QSA]

I thought (.*) would allow everything.

This works:

.com/1234fsjsjskk/

but this wont:

.com/1234fsjsjskk:56/


I'm using php to split the complete string to how I need it.

$tokens = preg_split('#/#', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

Thanks so much for any help!

[Dideved]

Turns out this has nothing to do with your rewrite rules. Apache for Windows intentionally disallows colons in the first path segment. It's meant to avoid security issues, since the underlying filesystem also uses colons.

See [issues.apache.org...] for more into.

[hiccupsheadache]

Thanks Dideved - I don't know how you found that out -- I spent ages trying/changing the htaccess file trying to get it to work!

It works fine when I move my code to a Linux server :-)

[lucy24]

It works fine when I move my code to a Linux server

Uh-oh. There are situations when you can safely ignore a particular platform or a particular browser ... but if you've got an URL that only works on some servers, you should think seriously about changing the URL to something more interoperable. You can't go wrong with alphanumerics.

[Dideved]

Thanks Dideved - I don't know how you found that out -- I spent ages trying/changing the htaccess file trying to get it to work!

I started off just copy-pasting your htaccess and tried a URL with a colon. Got a "Forbidden" response, which is unusual. Checked the error.log and saw the message "The given path is misformatted or contained invalid characters." Popped that error message into Google, and found the bug report I posted above.