End my urls with trailing slash (/) or not? And how do I go about it doing this with codeigniter..

Question

Hey guys, I am trying to figure out which is most appropriate. From the articles I have read, it seems best to end url's with a trailing slash.

So instead of: http://www.site.com/article

It would read: http://www.site.com/article/

First I adjusted my htaccess to force a trailing slash.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}      ^.+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.+)$              $1/   

Then I started implementing this in my links and I thought if I did anchor('article/','article') it would work, but it seems that this function strips the trailing slash.

To get around this I changed the config file to have $config['url_suffix'] = '/'. Which worked..MOSTLY fine.. except I have a document area on my site with pdf's and such. So the links created there would turn out like http://www.site.com/documents/doc1.pdf/ . This of course does not work.

What do you think my solution is here? I guess I could go back to any page I referenced documents or files in and adjust them to not use the anchor function, but I feel like there should be an easier way.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Sorry to maybe be rude-ish, but if it doesn't work (or causes problems), just don't do it and you're fine. Adding extra code for that kind of thing is wasted time. Some browsers add the slash automatically, so why worry? It really does not matter.

Answer 2

My sites use both. The trailing slash indicates something specific to users, i think. Since the "/" usually indicates a folder, users (especially technical) take this to mean that there are sub-folders or sub-parameters to this page. Not showing a user that slash could indicate that there are no sub folders. This works for things like files, such as your pdf file.

Because of this, I have chosen not to force either side, but to build my site in a way that reflects the users perceptions. But thats a philosophy thing, you build a site for users, not for the code, right? :-)