rewrite urls with slashes ( %2F ) in query string - apache

Question

I was wondering if there is a way to handle in a rewrite rule ( iis and apache ) url query strings which contain a slash ( %2F ) as part of it.
as an example:
www.domain.com/project/word1
gets rewritten to
www.domain.com/project/index.php?word=word1
via this rule ( in iis ):
<rule name="Friendly">
<match url="^(.+)$" ignoreCase="true" />
<conditions>
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="index.php?word={R:1}" appendQueryString="false" />
</rule>
or in apache:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?word=$1
this works correctly.
however there are cases like this :
www.domain.com/project/word1%2Fword2
which should be redirected to
www.domain.com/project/index.php?word=word1/word2
but obviously i get an error 404 because of the slash ( %2F ). Is there any way to solve this ? Even if it meant I have to cut off the /word2 part and redirect www.domain.com/project/word1%2Fword2 to www.domain.com/project/index.php?word=word1
thank you in advance

Answer 1

I find your case peculiar because in Apache's mod_rewrite module (I'm not sure about IIS) it's stated that RewriteRule patterns are matched against the, I quote, "(%-decoded) URL-path (or file-path, depending on the context) of the request".
What I'm experiencing though after testing is that the encoded slashes are not decoded or not interpreted by the server (I too get an 404 error).
However, I realize one mostly url encode URL parts when the content is to be used as a query string argument (for example http://www.example.com/?path=word1%2Fword2) which is logical because you don't want the server to interpret the encoded slash as a part of the URL path. Note that this observation is contradictive to the statement above so take it with a grain of salt.
Solution
What I can confirm however is that it's no problem rewriting www.domain.com/project/word1/word2. Therefore I suggest that you don't encode the pat of the URL that will be used in the path part, but possibly whitelist allowed characters instead so you avoid special characters like ?.
Test results
.htaccess:
RewriteRule ^(.+) index.php?word=$1 [L]
index.php:
<pre>
<?php var_dump( $_GET, true ); ?>
</pre>
URL: http://test/word1%2Fword2
Yields 404.
URL: http://test/word1/word2
Yields:
<?php
array (size=1)
'word' => string 'word1/word2' (length=11)
?>