Tonight I had trouble with parsing url’s.

I wanted  to create some SEO-friendly url’s for a new site and the PATH_INFO server variable is a good base for it.

My url:

site/productname/camera

It’s easy to parse the url to segments with an explode on “/”

But I had a specific url that caused me troubles:

site/productname/cameraz.

Strangely  the  trailing dot disappeared:

echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']
site/productname/cameraz

while

echo $_SERVER['REQUEST_URL']
site/productname/cameraz.

That’s weird. I never saw those differences before.

I tried it on an old server with php 5.1.2. And NO difference there.

Somehow a bug entered in php 5.2.5 that deletes a trailing dot in $_SERVER[‘PATH_INFO’].

Be aware!

Of course it can also be caused in interaction with the apache-server.