Error 404 when the URL contains special characters (braces, hyphens etc.)

Server NGINX
1

In my (Zend Framework 2) application I have a catalog of cities with
links
to sports pages:

page “Cities” (/catalog)
Madrid link: website.tld/catalog/Madrid
Berlin link: website.tld/catalog/Berlin
London link: website.tld/catalog/London

page “Sports in London” (/catalog/London)
Foo link: website.tld/catalog/London/Foo
Bar (Bar) link: website.tld/catalog/London/Bar (Bar)
Baz - Baz link: website.tld/catalog/London/Baz - Baz

The URLs are escaped and work well. But when I try to reach a page with
an
unescaped special character like a brace (e.g.
“website.tld/catalog/Berlin/Jeu de Paume (Real Tennis)” instead of
“website.tld/catalog/Berlin/Jeu%20de%20Paume%20%28Real%20Tennis%29”), I
get
a 404 Error.

How to fix it?

What I want to achieve is a behaviour like à la Wikipedia – You can use
“Signal - Wikipedia” or
“Signal - Wikipedia” and
will
always get the corect page.

Additional info:

System properties:

Debian 7, nginx 1.2.1, PHP 5.5.

nginx.conf:

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections 768;
}

http {

sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
types_hash_max_size 2048;

include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;

access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

gzip on;
gzip_disable “msie6”;

include /etc/nginx/conf.d/.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/;
}

ax-common-vhost:

server {
listen 80;
server_name
foo.loc
bar.loc
baz.loc
;

if ($host ~ ^(?<project>.+)\.(?<area>.+)\.loc$) {
    #set $project $1;      # already set
    #set $area $2;        # already set

    set $folder "$area/$project";
    #set $domain "$project.$area.loc";  # equal to $host
}

access_log /var/log/nginx/$area/$project.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

gzip on;
gzip_min_length 1000;
gzip_types text/plain text/xml application/xml;

client_max_body_size 25m;

root /var/www/$folder/public/;

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
index index.html index.php;

location / {
    index index.html index.php;

sendfile off;
}

location ~ (\.inc\.php|\.tpl|\.sql|\.tpl\.php|\.db)$ {
    deny all;
}

location ~ \.htaccess {
    deny all;
}

if (!-e $request_filename) {
    rewrite ^.*$ /index.php last;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
  fastcgi_cache        off;
  #fastcgi_pass        127.0.0.1:9001;
  fastcgi_pass         unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
  fastcgi_read_timeout 6000;
  fastcgi_index        index.php;
  include              fastcgi_params;
  fastcgi_param        SCRIPT_FILENAME

$document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param APPLICATION_ENV development;
fastcgi_param HTTPS $https;
}
}

Posted at Nginx Forum: