Disallow trailing slashes in path aliases

This same patch should work for 7x-dev.

Without patch:
function drupal_lookup_path("source", $path)

Will look up $path

With patch:
function drupal_lookup_path("source", $path)

Will look up $path, then if not found and $path does not end in a '/' it looks again for $path."/"

Crell,

There is some discussion about it here:
http://drupal.org/node/160753

The situation where this patch is needed is not a user error, but rather when the user wants a node to get a url_alias of something like 'my_node/' because they want this node to appear like an index page of a directory.

I don't think you should label this a user error because it is not the way you would structure a site. I believe Drupal should offer the site builder the flexability to put pages at locations like 'my_node/' if they want. If you read the discussion at above node, you will see users have various reasons for wanting to do this.

Thanks.

My point isn't that it is the best option in all situations, but that the site builder should have the flexibility to build his aliases as desired. Your arguments against structuring your site like this are good ones, however I don't see a real benefit doing it that way either. It is just that Drupal is currently restricted in this way, so there is a resistance to change, and would have to be an obvious benefit/reason for the change rather than just to provide more flexibility and options in configuring his/her site.

Upgrading an existing site structured in this way to Drupal is one huge example of where site builders want this flexibility. If you read the thread linked above, most of the people wanting this feature are people migrating sites from other systems, and don't want to risk deteriorating their rankings (even if temporarily) by switching to a system that can't preserve their old URLs w/out redirects. Multiple people looking to switch to Drupal have stated this as the main consideration for them NOT making the switch.

On more thing to note:

Currently in Drupal (at least 5.7) you can create new content, and set the path alias to something like 'test/'. It will allow you to save the content and Drupal will give no errors. A new row is inserted into the {url_alias} table with a dst of 'test/'. However, this page will never be able to be accessed and after saving, the user will be given a 'page not found'.

If we aren't going to allow the system to work with aliases like 'test/', then the saving of them being permitted is certainly a bug. However, I would rather see them working after the save, than not saving at all.

That is what the system is currently doing. However if there is a path in the system that ends in a trailing slash (which the system does let you enter) then this path can never be found using current methods.

His a new patch. It has been requested here: http://drupal.org/node/160753

It doesn't introduce an extra query. Note that if the path you are looking for is 'about/', drupal_lookup_path is actually sent just 'about' (the slash is stripped elsewhere and it would invove a much more complex patch to change that functionality).

The only downside of this patch is that you cannot have working paths in your system of both 'about' and 'about/'. Given that the original problem was that the Drupal allows saving of paths with a trailing slash, but then they could never be accessed, this is an improvement.

Here is an example of how it works, given the path 'about'.

drupal_lookup_path: 'about'
queries URL alias table for: 'about' or 'about/'

Return whatever comes back
If BOTH come back, only 'about' (without trailing slash) is returned.

I guess this should actually be a bug report as D5 allows you to save paths like 'about/', but drupal_get_path wont let you retrieve them.

Hi Drumm,

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I realize that the ability to save paths with a trailing slash will probably never make it into drupal core. I refined and reposted this patch specifically because multiple users have asked me to repost it because they do want that functionality.

The underlying issue for them (and myself) is that we be able to preserve and lookup paths with trailing slashes. Hence the suggestions to simply patch drupal core to not allow us to save paths with trailing slashes, while a valid bug that should be fixed, does not solve our problem (we can't currently use paths with a trailing slash and we want/need to).

I do have a hard time believing that adding an OR to an SQL query would produce a measurable performance loss.