Ending with period using Mod Rewrite

Question

I would like to know how to allow periods at the end on my url's. Currently if I had the url:

http://www.mydomain.com/Page/I.D.K.

The page grabbing the information would return

Title: I.D.K (Without the ending period)

This also happens with other punctuation and it is effecting my pages displaying information wrongly. Thanks for looking, hope somebody knows the solution.

I am using the following in my htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2&Level2=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2&Level2=$3&Level3=$4 [L]

Answer 1

I'm assuming this is located in http://www.mydomain.com/. Here's what I'd use for the second Rule (which can then be transposed to the other rules):

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9\-,]+)/([A-Za-z0-9.\-,]+)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2 [L]

That will match the following: (and will allow for hyphens, commas, and periods for Level1)

IDK/Jump.ing.
IDK/Jump.ing./

But not:

S$!LV/J

I try and whitelist my options (something like /[A-Z]/), rather than blacklist them (/[^3-5]/). I'm sure there are arguments for both options, but I like whitelisting mostly because I have control over what can be used. If I don't include it in my list, it's not a valid option. Of course, if you're accepting a LOT of options, then this could make for some very long character classes or whatnot. What if someone went to http://www.mydomain.com/Page/I.D.K.&somevariable=somevalue ? It could potentially break your script (if the person is smart). Your RewriteRule would send them to /index.php?Page=Page&Level1=I.D.K.&somevariable=somevalue. Not at all what you anticipated happening.

Answer 2

Ok problem virtually solved. The & still breaks my strings if I try doing Artist1 & Artist2 but I will just use string replace to replace that symbol with something else. Anyway, to allow punctuation anywhere, even at the end, I replaced all + with * in my rewrite rules. Here is how it looks now:

RewriteRule ^([^/.]*)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]*)/([^/]*)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2&Level2=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/?$ /index.php?Page=$1&Level1=$2&Level2=$3&Level3=$4 [L]

Hope this helps some other people with similar problems.