Re: Bug#391290: apache should automatically detect extra periods/commas at the end of URLs and fix

["Jason Spiro" <jasonspiro4@gmail.com>]

2006/10/5, Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de> wrote:
> On Thursday 05 October 2006 22:15, Jason Spiro wrote:
> > Many people type in URLs with extra periods or commas. For example,
> > a user may type:
> >     http://www.jspiro.com/wiki.
> > when they actually meant to type:
> >     http://www.jspiro.com/wiki
> >
> > This causes a lot of 404 errors on web servers everywhere. Would it
> > be possible for apache to automatically detect extra periods/commas
> > at the end of URLs and redirect clients to the correct place?
>
> This can be done with mod_speling or with something like
>
> RewriteRule ^(.*)[,.]$ $1 [R]
>
> though the latter will prevent you from requesting any file ending
> with period or comma. With some more refined rewrite magic using
> subrequests, you can probably avoid that.
>
> However, by default Apache should return exactly what was requested.
> Therefore I close this bug.

Why shouldn't Apache ship with a RewriteRule to correct such a common
error by default? It's very uncommon for webmasters to post files
whose names end with a period or comma anyway.

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