Redirect strange URLs with two periods in them - apache

Question

I had a static HTML website that I recently converted over to drupal. I have been monitoring my sites 404 errors in webmaster tools and drupal reports and have noticed that google has indexed strange urls. My guess is they came from relative links that were created improperly from the older static HTML site.
Here is an example:
www.example.com/items../item-page.html
The actual page is:
www.example.com/items/item-page.html
The new drupal site doesn't even have .html extensions. I am using URL redirect and path auto modules and have redirects setup for all of the old urls to make sure they are 301'd to the new URL structure (e.g. www.example.com/items/item-page.html would be 301 to www.example.com/items/item-page).
I have access to the server so I am doing my redirects in the apache httpd.conf file instead of .htaccess. I tried the following code to redirect ../ to / but I am not having any luck:
RewriteRule ^\.\./(.*) /$1 [R=301,NC,L]
This rule doesn't do anything when I go to a url with the ../ in it. Is there a rewriterule that can match ../ and remove it from any url?
NOTE: I have other redirects in apache httpd.conf that are working fine...such as:
RewriteRule ^items/pdf/(.*)$ /sites/default/files/documents/items/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
So I don't think its my server configuration.
EDIT:
I noticed that the rewrite rule above for rewriting the pdf directory works even with the .. in the URL. Example:
http://www.example.com/items../pdf/somedocument.pdf
redirects to
http://www.example.com/sites/default/files/documents/items/somedocument.pdf
So it looks like the .. is completely ignored in rewrite rules, which is why I can't get anything to work. Does anyone know a way around that?

Answer 1

I believe you need to escape your forward slash.
I believe rewriterule acts against the HTTP request URI, not the page link.
Consequently, I believe you will need to remove the carat to find a match, and analyze your intentional URLs to see if that would have a negative impact elsewhere.

Answer 2

You can use this
RewriteRule ^/items\.\.(.+)$ /items/$1 [L,R]
This will redirect /items..foobar to /items/foobar

Answer 3

I was not able to fix the issue using rewrite rules in apache due to the rewrite rules not finding ".." in the url for unknown reasons.
My solution was to create a custom drupal module that looks to see if ".." is in the URL. If the ".." string is found, then I have it set to redirect to the url without ".." in it using built-in drupal functions. Here is the code I used in my module.
function doubledot_fix_init() {
$destination = drupal_get_destination();
$alias = drupal_get_path_alias($destination['destination']);
$fixpath = str_replace("..", "", $alias, $count);
if ($count > 0) {
drupal_goto($fixpath, array(), 301);
}
}
I do not see any reason this fix will break anything, because ".." should never really be found in any URL. If anyone can think of a situation that this fix could cause an issue, or if you know of a better solution, please let me know.