I had my website designed using PHP and MySQL backend. Initially the website was designed with upper and lowercase letters in link names, obviously for better readability. Thus, we had links such as the one below, capitalizing the E of English:

http://www.islediscount.com/English/index.php

Then, most people started typing in link names in all lowercase letters and browser did not find a match for a valid link! Thus, we decided to use only lowercase letters for link names and renamed all links. Now there is another problem: The older site had Upper/Lower case structure and some folks retained those link addresses (from our email marketing campaigns) and when people request for older links, there are a lot of occurences of page not found errors! Is there a way to route the older links to the new ones, using some global script on the server side that makes the cases not sensitive?

In Other Words, if I were to put the profile of Shawn Dohmen on my website and if someone types in rootaddress/Shawn.Dohmen.php or rootaddress/shawn.dohmen.php reqeusts should route to one single page.. let it be either one of the above two, but preferably the upper/lower case one. I would like it to work both ways i.e. from uppercase to lowercase and lowercase to uppercase, translated or rather routed!

Thank you in advance for any tips on resolving this issue,

Shawn Dohmen

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Hi,

A couple of options that I can think of are:

1. Disable case sensitivity on Apache. This article might help.

2. Use mod rewrites to redirect requests for lowercase URLs to uppercase, etc.

R.

Thank you for your immediate reply.

I am going to check this with my server guys and see if they could implement this. This server has other sites on it, but I guess this change should be a good one, for all sites!

The Mod rewrite is something my administrator recommended, but the number of combinations are numerous, unless we could rewrite a common script to take care of all combinations, essentially neutralizing case sensitivity!

Thank you,

Shawn Dohmen

I just found out that we will not be able to disable case sensitivity at the server level becuase payment gateway generates dynamic link that should be case sensitive for better security. Thank you for your suggestion..

Shawn Dohmen

Thank you it worked.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.