searches beginning with a . lead to apache Forbidden error

This is also an issue in D8.

Oh, and it is only an issue with clean urls on.

This issue may not seem like a big deal, but just this week as I was doing a lot of searching for .vimrc files (I am trying to switch to Vim) I had the problem a number of times, so I ended up writing the attached patch.

The reason a 403 will always be sent when clean urls is on is that in Drupal .htaccess there is a rewrite rule that blocks access to any directory starting with a '.'. This is a feature I think we should definitely keep, so the only way to make it possible for Drupal to allow searches starting with '.' is to url-escape an initial period.

The patch introduces a helper function - not sure if that is the way to go, so all input is very welcome. I was also quite unsure what to name the function. There was already a test written for searching numbers, so I just added a number starting with a decimal to a list of things to test for in that function and set clean urls to true. Clean urls should be on in the number test anyway in my opinion.

Tagging

#3: dot-search-1421560-3.patch queued for re-testing.

Fixing tags per http://drupal.org/node/1517250

This is still i (small) feature I would love to see in Drupal. All the other cool kids have it!

Here is a reroll.

Re-rolled!

This is essentially the same problem as #890058: Searching for ../../admin takes me to the admin page but with a different Apache configuration.

We are addressing this on
#894486: Use the query string for search keys rather than appending them to the URL