Slash URL
By Jeff Boes
December 4, 2012
There’s always more to learn in this job. Today I learned that Apache web server is smarter than me.
A typical SEO-friendly solution to Interchange pre-defined searches (item categories, manufacturer lists, etc.) is to put together a URL that includes the search parameter, but looks like a hierarchical URL:
/accessories/Mens-Briefs.html
/manufacturer/Hanes.html
Through the magic of actionmaps, we can serve up a search results page that looks for products which match on the “accessories” or “manufacturer” field. The problem comes when a less-savvy person adds a field value that includes a slash:
accessories: “Socks/Hosiery”
or
manufacturer: “Disney/Pixar”
Within my actionmap Perl code, I wanted to redirect some URLs to the canonical actionmap page (because we were trying to short-circuit a crazy Web spider, but that’s beside the point). So I ended up (after several wild goose chases) with:
my $new_path = '/accessories/' .
Vend::Tags->filter({body => (join '%2f' => (grep { /\D/ } @path)),
op => 'urlencode', }) .
'.html';
By this I mean: I put together my path out of my selected elements, joined them with a URL-encoded slash character (%2f), and then further URL-encoded the result. This was counter-intuitive, but as you can see at the first link in this article, it’s necessary because Apache is smarter than you. Well, than me anyway.
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