: 404 outside the scope of ErrorDocument 404 and htaccess i have an interesting problem, this link: http://masterarbeit-im-unternehmen.de/Thema_Entwicklung%20von%20Handlungsempfehlungen%20f%C3%BCr%20die%20Prozessweiterentwicklung%20des%20Vert

@Jamie184

masterarbeit-im-unternehmen.de/Thema_Entwicklung%20von%20Handlungsempfehlungen%20f%C3%BCr%20die%20Prozessweiterentwicklung%20des%20Vertriebskanals%20Konsignationsdirektgesch%C3%A4fte%20in%20der%20Bau-%2FBetonbranche-3994.html

Just noticed... you have an encoded slash (%2F) towards the end of the URL. This is what is causing the untrappable 404! This is triggered before mod_rewrite (and possibly .htaccess) even gets a look in, resulting in a server configured 404.

This is by design and is controlled by the AllowEncodedSlashes Core Apache directive - but this is only configurable in the server config. From the linked Apache docs:


With the default value, Off, such URLs are refused with a 404 (Not found) error.


An encoded slash in the URL is usually a sign of an incorrectly encoded URL.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Angela700

I have ideas which is probably the closest you'll get to an official answer.


The URL length is rather long. It should be less than about 80 characters to make it accessible when sent inside of emails.
The URL is rather substandard. You have a lot of percent signs followed by numbers. When decoding your URL, the resulting URL would contain a lot of spaces which doesn't work right on the web and could possibly confuse the web server into thinking you want a special folder. Assuming the server software takes a space as the termination point, the resulting URL passed into the server would be: masterarbeit-im-unternehmen.de/Thema_Entwicklung A strict configuration might be set in place on the server. For example, it might have been configured to accept no more than a certain number of characters in a URL. This link has more info if your web server is apache based: stackoverflow.com/questions/1289585/what-is-apaches-maximum-url-length There is a chance that the file that is handling the error document might be configured to redirect users to other pages if the URL exceeds a certain length or is of an improper format. I did check the two URLs and the error for abc.html I think is managed by a PHP script because I see X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.26 in the header.


Of all the ideas, Idea #2 probably is the main issue because in your long URL, I attempted to access it and replaced all the percent encoded numbers (%##) with a hyphen and your custom 404 page appeared. The resulting URL I tried after all the fixing is this: masterarbeit-im-unternehmen.de/Thema_Entwicklung-von-Handlungsempfehlungen-für-die-Prozessweiterentwicklung-des-Vertriebskanals-Konsignationsdirektgeschäfte-in-der-Bau--Betonbranche-3994.html

Vote Up Vote Down