The joy of IE and URLs, or how to fix ridiculous parsing errors on the part of some "helpers"

Short version. Day job sending some marketing out. URLs are pretty clear cut. Tested well. But some clients seem to have mis-parsed the url. Like with a trailing “)”. For some reason. That I don’t quite grok. I tried a few ways of fixing it. Yes, I know, because I fixed it, I baked it into the spec. /sigh First was a regex rewrite rule. Turns out the rewrite didn’t quite work the way it was intended, and it killed the requests. The regex works fine (we tested). The web server just did strange things. Ok, lets try a location block. Craft the same basic thing as the rewrite, but before the main server.

# fix the trailing ")" ... yes ... really ... IE I am looking at you
 location ~ /(.*)\)$ {
        return 301 $scheme://blahblahblah.io/$1;
 }

restart the webserver, test … and it works. Not fun, and now the trailing characters are encapsulated in the web spec. But at least those whom are fundamentally challenged in their choice of browser options, can now not have said browser muck up the situation … unless they don’t process redirects/moved …