Topic: Mod_rewrite for %20 black urls returning.

[wendellhatcher1074]

Hello, I have an issue where we have Apache 2.4.4.X using mod_proxy_balancer pointing at Apache Tomcat 8. Our applications returning an outside url that has space in the url i.e. (www.example.com/myapp/ structs/ somedata/ We want to return this url without spaces because it fails. I have tried Apache mod_rewrite and the regex below within my vhost.conf file as well as using it with the Apache tomcat rewrite module inside of a rewrite.conf file with no success.

I confirmed it was working atleast running by using the trace8 on my mod_rewrite loglevel. But, what it doesnt do is clean up the spaces in question.

# remove spaces from start or after /
RewriteRule ^(.*/|)[\s%20]+(.+)$ $1$2 [L]

# remove spaces from end or before /
RewriteRule ^(.+?)[\s%20]+(/.*|)$ $1$2 [L]

# replace spaces by - in between
RewriteRule ^([^\s%20]*)(?:\s|%20)+(.*)$ $1-$2 [L,R]

[James Blond]

The regex is not as you think it is

See https://regexper.com/#%5E%28.*%5C%2F%7C%29%5B%5Cs%2520%5D%2B%28.%2B%29%24

It replaces white space or % or 2 or 0

I suggest ( haven't tested it yet)

RewriteRule ^(\S*)\s+(\S*\s+.*)$ $1$2 [L]

[tangent]

Regex syntax aside, I think your problem here is mod_rewrite applies to requests not responses. You need mod_substitute to edit the responses returned by your Tomcat.

The logic you need will depend on whether Tomcat is sending response header redirects to the outside URL, or equally those URLs are embedded in the response body.

See https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_substitute.html for sample syntax.