Issue In Removing Double Or More Slashes From URL By .htaccess

Question

I am using the following htaccess rul to remove double or more slashes from web urls:

#remove double/more slashes in url
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

This is working fine for slashes occured in the middle of uris, such as, If use url:

http://demo.codesamplez.com/html5//audio

Its being redirected to proper single slahs url:

http://demo.codesamplez.com/html5/audio

But if the url contains double slashes in the beginning, JUST AFTER the domain name, then there its not working, example:

http://demo.codesamplez.com//html5/audio

its not being redirected.

How I can fix the above rule to work for this type of urls as well? Thanks.

Answer 1

Give it a try with:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/{2,} [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) $1 [R=301,L]

It should redirect to a single slash at the end of the domain. And an improvement on yours:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)/{2,}(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

Answer 2

For me, the following rules work perfectly:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteBase /

    # rule 1: remove multiple leading slashes (directly after the TLD)
    RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/{2,}
    RewriteRule (.*) $1 [R=301,L]

    # rule 2: remove multiple slashes in the requested path
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)/{2,}(.*)$
    RewriteRule (.*) %1/%2 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

The idea is heavily based on Marcels answer (thanks!), but this one is a bit more lightweight and includes the RewriteBase, which may be helpful if you work with specific subdirectory structures. Additionally, Marcels answer lacks explanation, which I wanted to fix:

Rule 1: {THE_REQUEST} contains something like GET /index.html HTTP/1.1 (see docs). Hence, if we match the first whitespace (\s) followed by multiple slashes (/{2,}), we can access the correct URL without the leading double slash via $1.

Rule 2: The regular expression ^(.*)/{2,}(.*)$ splits the request URI on multiple slashes. %1/%2 then combines the two splitted strings again, but with only one slash at this time.