End my urls with trailing slash (/) or not? And how do I go about it doing this with codeigniter

Question

I am trying to figure out which is most appropriate. From the articles I have read, it seems best to end url's with a trailing slash.

So instead of: http://example.url/article

It would read: http://example.url/article/

First I adjusted my htaccess to force a trailing slash.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}      ^.+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.+)$              $1/   

Then I started implementing this in my links and I thought if I did anchor('article/','article') it would work, but it seems that this function strips the trailing slash.

To get around this I changed the config file to have $config['url_suffix'] = '/'. Which worked mostly fine - except I have a document area on my site with pdf's and such. So the links created there would turn out like http://example.url/documents/doc1.pdf/ . This of course does not work.

What do you think my solution is here? I guess I could go back to any page I referenced documents or files in and adjust them to not use the anchor function, but I feel like there should be an easier way.

Answer 1

My sites use both. The trailing slash indicates something specific to users, i think. Since the "/" usually indicates a folder, users (especially technical) take this to mean that there are sub-folders or sub-parameters to this page. Not showing a user that slash could indicate that there are no sub folders. This works for things like files, such as your pdf file.

Because of this, I have chosen not to force either side, but to build my site in a way that reflects the users perceptions. But thats a philosophy thing, you build a site for users, not for the code, right? :-)