CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urliiscoldfusioniis-7.5coldfusion-9
jzimmerman2011
jzimmerman2011

Reputation: 1806

Why is IIS 7.5 / Coldfusion 9 adding a weird character to URL string?

We have built a "redirect" engine into our product so our customers can add/edit/delete custom redirects without us having to maintain a bunch of rewrite rules on the server.

Some issues are arising in the URLs that get passed into our code. We are pulling these from the CGI.QUERY_STRING property populated by Coldfusion (it picks up on 404's thrown by IIS/Coldfusion, which appends the bad URL as a query string like ?404;http://www.mysite.com:80/nonexistent-file.cfm).

What we see is that some special characters are getting an additional character thrown in there (an Â) character. Take this URL (%A9 is the copyright symbol):

http://www.mysite.com/%A9/

The CGI.QUERY_STRING is reporting this as:

http://www.mysite.com:80/©/

I have no idea where this extra "Â" is coming from. I have a hunch that this is being brought in by IIS, but it could also be with Coldfusion as it has to populate the CGI variable.

Any ideas as to why this is happening and how to fix it? It appears that not all percent-encoded/special characters do this...

EDIT:

I am probably giving up on my exact problem, however, it would be beneficial still to know why either IIS or Coldfusion is throwing in this extra character (especially for certain escape sequences over others).

Upvotes: 1

Views: 425

Answers (1)

Mark A Kruger
Mark A Kruger

Reputation: 7193

Wow... that's a tough one. Usually folks design sites to use alphanumeric plus the tilde (~) and dash (=). I'm not even sure if the RFC allows for a copywrite symbol as part of the host header. I'm not positive that it should be allowed in the scheme portion of the URL. This article might shed some light on it for you. As for IIS - you might be able to add a specific rewrite rule that takes care of the issue. Personally I would avoid these characters in the schema part of the URL.

Upvotes: 1

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