ASP.NET MVC - how to modify requested URLs?

Question

The baidu spider seems to be adding ¤ to end of some crawled urls (it seems that it happens with urls containing single unicode character as the last character)

The baidu-requested url looks like this:

site.com/abc/ä¤

while

site.com/abc/ä is the valid url and as linked from many places on my site.

The internal problem is that a different route is matched for this kind of url and an unhandled exception occurs.

I would not like to lose baidu because of too many 500 errors on the site.

I would like to change the requested URL to a different URL by removing the added character before any ASP.NET MVC processing of the request starts.

Can I write a request filter/http module or something similar in ASP.NET MVC to remove the trailing '¤' from the urls? I would not like to alter my routes to counter-hack this behavior.

Answer 1

im not sure, but maybe adding a route like "{controller}/{action}/{id}¤", with the caracter there on the end

this route should come before the one you're currently using

Answer 2

I like the "fix it in the Route" answer, but here's an alternative (sorry it's in VB)

Public Class BaseController : Inherits System.Web.Mvc.Controller
    Protected Overrides Function CreateActionInvoker() As System.Web.Mvc.IActionInvoker
            If HttpContext.Request.RawUrl.EndsWith("¤") Then
                Dim redir As String = Replace(HttpContext.Request.RawUrl, "¤", "")
                Response.Redirect(redir)
            End If
    End Sub
End Class

then inherit ALL of your controllers from the BaseController

Note: string.replace is not the "best" way if the trailing character is valid in a normal URL, you'll want to trim it off some other way.