+AD0-, +AF8-, +ACY- in logfiles, causing 404

[kevinsl]

I'm seeing these strange characters in my logfiles and it's causing 404's.

For example an url on my site may be [site.com...]

But when some users click it I see this request in the logile:
GET /test+AF8-it.php?var1+AD0-5+ACY-var2+AD0-10

This happens very rarely but still causes problems for a few users. Does anyone know what causes this and how to fix it?

thanks

[stas_k]

Hi.

I see the same in my logs. Maybe some recent MS IE
hotfix is causing this?

PS. These sequences look like UTF7 encoding...

[lemat]

Try to view the source of this page. Look at these links. Do they look strange or normal? Also try to

telnet your_host 80
GET /your_page HTTP/1.1
Host: www.your_host.tld
Connection: close [2xEnter here]

and see the "plain text". Tak a look at the charset, that serwer returns at the top. Try to mess with AddDefaultCharset=XXX (change charset / comment etc.) in your httpd.conf.

Maybe it's serwer problem or maybe it's browser problem. You have to check it out, maybe using different browser.

[stas_k]

BTW, server can output different charset to different
browsers, depending on request headers.
So it's better to use sniffer and real browser session,
than telnet.

[kevinsl]

I think it has something to do with IE. All instances of this has MSIE in the user agent.

As a temporary fix I recommended users to use firefox.