lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:

...

The following URL goes successfully to the desired article:

• http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Insomnia&redirect=no

The "random page" error occurs for me only when I follow a link by

clicking on it:

...

• http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia

Maybe this behavior difference of the 2 forms of the same URL will

provide a hint of the bug's cause.

Thanks, and yes, that's a clue. I just rebooted the server since Jimbo said that fixed it last time, but I'll look into it more closely now--maybe mod_redirect is dying for some reason?

As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty sure it's the encoding hack I set up to keep ampersands in titles _in_ the titles instead of as raw ampersands that indicate the beginning of the next variable in the query string:

RewriteEngine On RewriteMap urlencode prg:/usr/local/bin/urlencode RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*)$ /w/wiki.phtml?title=${urlencode:$1} [L]

If the hackish little external program should die or get out of sync, we end up with the wrong URLs. But this ugliness *shouldn't* be needed. We *should* be able to use the internal function that Apache provides for this:

RewriteEngine On RewriteMap urlencode int:encode RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*)$ /w/wiki.phtml?title=${urlencode:$1} [L]

but that function doesn't encode ampersands (%26), so it misses the entire point of the exercise.

If anyone knows a cleaner way to do this, do speak up. I've gotten eerie silence on alt.apache.configuration.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)