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#7853 – Infinite slashes '/' are allowed in URLs

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Sunday, 06 June 2021 16:54 UTC

TheSDHotel

Hey there,

I randomly stumbled upon and found a potentially obscure issue.

You can add any amount of forward slashes in-between url fragments, and the page will keep working and resolve the page.

See example:

https://www.xxxx.com////////events-results/ppv-special/////njpw-world-tag-league-2016-finals

You can add as many slashes as you like in any of the URL fragments. It will keep working and resolves the page.

But apparently, Googling around, this is a "normal" behavior: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10161177/url-with-multiple-forward-slashes-does-it-break-anything

So I guess nothing that has to do with sh404sef. But I noticed it will even keep those slashes in the canonical URL that sh404sef generates as well. Eg. check the canonical URL in the HTML of the page I sent you.

Let me know what you think!

Sunday, 06 June 2021 18:02 UTC

TheSDHotel

Weirdly enough, Invision Power Board is able to return a 404 in those cases (which is likely a lot better). See example:

https://www.xxxx.com/forum/////user//////1-andy-badwool/

https://www.xxxx.com/forum/user/1-andy-badwool/

Strangely, Joomla is not able to do that. Maybe something that you could add to sh404sef?

Monday, 07 June 2021 09:04 UTC

wb_weeblr

Strangely, Joomla is not able to do that. Maybe something that you could add to sh404sef?

Indeed, I'm even surprised sh404SEF is tricked by that. I suspect this is because we work inside Joomla router and by the time we get the request information, Joomla has already removed the multiple /.

Does not seem major but I'll add it to tracker, we may be able to workaround this.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Monday, 07 June 2021 09:23 UTC

TheSDHotel

Joomla has already removed the multiple /.

What you mean? I think the issue is that Joomla does not remove those extra slashes? But maybe I misunderstood what you mean.

But yeah, probably not major, never figured this out in all these years.

Not sure if in this case it would be better to resolve to a 404 page, or to instead 301 redirect to the the "correct" page with stripped extra slashes (the page with just one / slash per separator)

But I also think this is not something that should be your job to fix (in sh404sef) but probably rather something that Joomla should fix probably.

Monday, 07 June 2021 10:09 UTC

wb_weeblr

What you mean? I think the issue is that Joomla does not remove those extra slashes? But maybe I misunderstood what you mean.

It totally does, this is why it actually works and can display a page. By default for instance, Joomla strips from incoming requests a trailing slash, ie if you request /my-page or /my-page/, Joomla will consider this the same page (what's displayed on screen is not relevant here, it's only the internals that matter for decoding a request).

I remember that I have special processing to put back a trailing slash into the URL before trying to decode it because it's a common situation but I certainly do not try to restore multiple ///.

But yeah, probably not major, never figured this out in all these years.

I have never even heard of this in 15 years. How would such URLs be created?

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Monday, 07 June 2021 10:57 UTC

TheSDHotel

Gotcha.

I have never even heard of this in 15 years. How would such URLs be created?

Yeah, crazy, me neither :D

They (likely) don't get created in any way.

I just stumbled upon it via a typo. I accidentally had an extra / in a URL and noticed it. And noticed it still worked as normal. So I wondered, wait, how does this work? If 2 slashes worked, what if I add more? What if I add 10 slashes? And it still works. And that's how I stumbled upon this quirkness :D

Monday, 07 June 2021 12:34 UTC

wb_weeblr

OK, so I thought. Will stay like that I think.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Monday, 07 June 2021 15:01 UTC

TheSDHotel

Yup.

I will look into fixing it via htaccess, or leaving it like that.

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