Is it bad to use double slashes in the URL path?
apache, browser, url, url-rewriting
Solution
There is nothing in RFC 3986 (especially in the Normalization and Comparison section) suggesting that a slash in the URI path could be removed, no matter in which context.
Generally, every single character is meaningful. So your two URIs (with and without the second slash) are different URIs.
Example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki// redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_%28punctuation%29,
while
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.
Problem
My feed reader uses URLs like `http://example.com/feed/feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml`. This URL displays content from `http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml`. I've recently added a pagination feature by appending `/page/123` to the end of URLs. For example, page 2 of the BBC feed would be `http://example.com/feed/feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml/page/2`. However, some feed URLs end in slashes, such as `http://news.yahoo.com/news/`. Page 2 of this feed would be `http://example.com/feed/news.yahoo.com/news//page/2`. Is this double slash bad? Will any browser ignore the double slash and request `http://example.com/feed/news.yahoo.com/news/page/2` instead? `http://example.com/feed/news.yahoo.com/news/page/2` returns 404 not found. P.S. I'm using Apache's rewrite module to send all requests to a PHP script that processes the rewriting.