This came up at ApacheCon a couple of weeks ago. I just took this knowledge for granted, as I have always accounted for it, but both Rich and Trawick were surprised. As I thought about it some more, it seems this may be a POLA violation. Thoughts? If we agree it should be fixed, I can make the bugz and make a patch.
Consider: <Location "/slash/foo"> ... </Location> vs. <LocationMatch "^/slash/foo"> ... </LocationMatch> These do not behave the same if multiple slashes are used. The leading slashes are always coalesced, so "^/..." is fine; however, any intermediate slashes are not. So, in order for the LocationMatch directive above to behave the same as the Location, it has to be specified as "^/slash/+foo". Like I said, I have always accounted for this in my regexps, but it doesn't seem "right". Should the URL be normalized before being passed to regex-matching directives, or is there a specific reason that is not done? +-------------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+ | Path | Non-Regex | *Match, | *Match, | | | Directive: | RewriteRule: | RewriteRule: | | | /slash/foo | ^/slash/foo | ^/slash/+foo | +-------------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+ | /slash/foo | Match | Match | Match | +-------------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+ | ////slash/foo | Match | Match | Match | +-------------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+ | /slash///foo | Match | XXX | Match | +-------------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+ | ////slash///foo// | Match | XXX | Match | +-------------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+
