[Catalyst] Slash characters in a path argument

Ian Wells ijw at cack.org.uk
Tue Sep 27 14:41:53 GMT 2011


I have a string I want to use as one argument to a controller.  It's
user-sourced and occasionally has slashes in.

I use this as

    $c->uri_for('/controller/action', 'string/with/slashes');

(done in TT, as it happens, but the results are the same)


I'd like that argument to be the first argument of my controller.  uri_for
doesn't encode the slashed string, so that gives me
/controller/action/string/with/slashes, and misses my one-argument action.

If I URI-encode it, things work better in the Catalyst webserver, <app>_
server.pl

$c->uri_for('/controller/action', 'string%2Fwith%2Fslashes');

The url is then /controller/action/string%2Fwith%2Fslashes and the action is
found; Catalyst even decodes it, and we're laughing.

However, this leads to weird things happening.  If you run under
lighttpd/fastcgi, it thoughtfully decodes the slashes for you, which brings
us back to the first case: it misses my 1-argument controller and gets me a
404.  Catalyst reports:

[debug] "GET" request for
"content/series/David%20Audley%20/%20Jack%20Butler:%20Chronological%20Order"
from "xx.xx.xx.xx"
[debug] Path is "/"
[debug] Arguments are "content/series/David Audley / Jack Butler:
Chronological Order"

Now, one answer to this is to encode slashes in such strings as
non-uri-encoding.  Another is to have special-case actions that can have
slashed arguments in them.  A third would be to change lighttpd's behaviour
- there's a bug open for exactly that but no activity on it; also, I suspect
other webservers behave similarly...


Has anyone come up against this before?  Any tips?

Cheers,
-- =

Ian.
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