How can I fix PHP AltoRouter URL character problems? - php

Question

I have problem with my router.
This page is working:
$router->map('GET', '/home', function(){
global $vt,$title,$router;
echo "Working!";
exit();
},'main.view');
but, when I using not latin characters like this;
$router->map('GET', '/ğşçİ', function(){
global $vt,$title,$router;
echo "404 Not Found!";
exit();
},'main.view');
router going to 404 page.
How can I fix this problem? I need all characters to work. ( Arabic, Cyrillic, China, Turkish .. )

Answer 1

This is happening because web browsers encode many non-ascii characters in URLs before they are event sent/requested. I'm going to over-simplify a lot of stuff in my answer, since encoding is complicated stuff, but in short, even though your address bar might show:
example.com/ğşçİ
...what actually gets requested ends up being:
example.com/%C4%9F%C5%9F%C3%A7%C4%B0
Since AltoRouter compares (by default) on the encoded URI, your route is not matching, since ğşçİ !== %C4%9F%C5%9F%C3%A7%C4%B0
Solution:
Rather than trying to match the encoded URI, the easiest solution here is to just tell AltoRouter to compare your routes based on the decoded URI. You will want to change this:
$match = $router->match();
to:
$match = $router->match(urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
Here is a tested, working demo. You need AltoRouter.php in the same directory, and your htaccess set up correctly. Code:
<?php
include './AltoRouter.php';
$router = new AltoRouter();
$router->map('GET', '/ğşçİ', function() {
echo 'main';
},'main.view');
$match = $router->match(urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
if($match){
call_user_func($match['target'], $match['params']);
}
Alternative: Encode the request matching strings
Alternatively, if you really want to leave the default matching of AltoRouter on the encoded value, you could get the match to trigger by encoding the actual match strings, like this:
$router->map('GET','/'.rawurlencode('ğşçİ'), function(){
...
},'main.view');
PS: For more details on URI encoding, this MDN page on encodeURI is a good starting spot. You can see what the actual encoded URI ends up being by checking the Chrome network requests panel, printing it in PHP with print_r($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);, or opening up Chrome console and run encodeURI('example.com/ğşçİ');.