Unescaping character in url

Server NGINX
1

Hi all,

I have a problem trying to rewrite a URL.

It should be pretty straightforward but it has been taking me hours
searching.

Google indexed urls containing “;”, which gets escaped to %3B:

http://server.com/plan/52%3Bjsessionid=A9594B224FF913C1A1AB83B0368C1581
(the original url that works is
http://server.com/path/52;jsessionid=A9594B224FF913C1A1AB83B0368C1581)

First approach was:
server {

location /plan/ {
rewrite /plan/(.)%3Bjsessionid=[A-Za-z0-9]+(.)
http://www.server.com/plan/$1$2 permanent;
}
(…)
}

but no dice, I get errors because it tries to fetch a file from disk (!)
/usr/local/nginx/html/plan/52" failed (2: No such file or directory),

Just to test I tried also with

if ($args ^~ jsessionid){
rewrite ^ http://example.com/ permanent;
}

…but it doesn’t like the ^~ which btw means the wiki for
NginxHttpRewriteModule is outdated for 0.6.29.

My question is: how can I simply do a rewrite to replace “%3B” to “;” ?

Thanks!

Francisco

2

Hello!

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 04:46:07PM +0200, Fr Tr wrote:

(the original url that works is
}
…but it doesn’t like the ^~ which btw means the wiki for
NginxHttpRewriteModule is outdated for 0.6.29.

If never has “^~”. This combination used in location matching and
means “no regex”, i.e. do not search for regex locations if this
static location match.

Proably you mean “!~” instead, but this anyway won’t work as in
your case jsessionid isn’t in args but in path instead (three is
no ‘?’ which separates them).

My question is: how can I simply do a rewrite to replace “%3B” to “;” ?

The basic problem is that you want to match “%3B” while nginx
already decoded it to be “;” instead. So the only aproach that
will work is matching against $request_uri, the original URI as got
from client.

Try this:

if ($request_uri ~ "%3Bjsessionid=") {
    rewrite  ^(.*)$  http://example.com$1  permanent;
}

This will catch clients with “%3B” but not ones with “;”.
Resulting redirect will have “%3B” replaced by “;” as nginx
already decoded it in internal representation.

Maxim D.

3

Try this:

if ($request_uri ~ "%3Bjsessionid=") {
    rewrite  ^(.*)$  http://example.com$1  permanent;
}

Thanks, it worked perfectly well!

Francisco