17 February 2007

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

Ampersand articles are working again ;-)

The long-standing problem of not being able to have ampersands in article names has been fixed at last! It was actually not the XmlWiki code at all, but our mod-rewrite rule for allowing Friendly URL's. The rule makes all requests for URL's in friendly format get transformed into the long format of .../wiki/index.php?title=pagename, but that means that any ampersands would be treated as query string separators and would never reach the PHP runtime environment.

A simple change of the rule to the semi-friendly format of .../wiki/index.php/pagename fixes the problem. It works because this semi-friendly format is descriptive enough for apache to determine that the index.php script should handle the request. That script can then obtain the article name from the full request information in the $_SERVER hash.