mod_rewrite and 8bit text handling

converting 8bit to 7bit?

[Olaf]

Hi all,

I am finally doing the mod_rewrite trick of hiding my dynamic pages.

from a domain.com/script?val1=23&val2=qwerty
to a domain.com/widgets/23/qwerty.html

Works like a charm thanks to all the help that I have read here at webmasterworld.

But, just as I thought I was finished I ran into a weird problem.

mod_rewrite seems to be converting my 8bit characters to 7bit. (we8iso8859p1 to us7ascii)

Here is one expample that I am running into:

.....com/../Heßmühle.html

this used to be a .../../script?value1=Heßmühle.html and worked like a charm.

What my script is recieving is this text :
Heßmühle

It takes each 8bit char and seems to convert it to 7bit since I now have 2 letters where there was only one (seems to split the 8bit into two 7bit)

Has anyone run into this before ? Anyone know any way around this? Any help would be much appreciated.

I have done a search in google, didnt find anything relevant.

Thanks
Olaf

[sugarkane]

Olaf, sorry I can't give a definitive answer to this, but as it's an issue concerning extended characters, maybe the RewriteMap [httpd.apache.org] directive could be used in some way to solve your problem?

[Olaf]

Hi, thanks for the tip.

I rewrote the procedure to use numbers and am now just accepting the 404 hits from search engines :)

I had recently moved the server between IP's and it was down for a couple of days due to Cisco config problems.

Google seems to have tried to crawl in the meantime since I dropped in pagerank from being under the "R" to just touching the "a".

So Im willing to take this extra hit while Googlebot builds up confidence in the site again..

Faster, codewise, to use primary key identifications (numbers) then character glob search. So the change is good from that perspective.

Olaf