301 redirect not working

Kembreg

Hey all.

Check out this URL and this code snippet.

http://www.linguashop.com/en/courses-for-learning-afrikaans.php?iframe=true&width=100%&height=100%

if (strpos($ThisPHPFile,'?')!==false)
{
$ThisPHPFile = explode('?', $ThisPHPFile);
$ThisPHPFile= $ThisPHPFile[0];
$ThisURL = 'http://www.linguashop.com'.$ThisPHPFile;
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $ThisURL");
exit; //No point in loading the site.php. Redirect loads it again anyhow
}

The snippet removes the parameters and should redirect to
http://www.linguashop.com/en/courses-for-learning-afrikaans.php

(i.e. without the parameters)

The redirect does not work on the first page load.
If I do a browse refresh it redirects no poblem.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Kembreg

Weedpacket

I can see straight off that your sample URL is invalid: the % sign is an escape character. So it's going reach your script mangled.

The other thing I see is that after using explode('?') to separate the scheme://domain/path from the querystring and discard the querystring, you're taking what's left at appending it to a scheme://domain part of a URL - despite the fact that you already have that.

Have a look at $ThisURL by printing it instead of redirecting to see this.

BTW: perhaps [man]parse_url[/man] would be a less approach.

Kembreg

Weedpacket,

Yes, the URL is strange.
Still, it's in google webmaster tools.
Hence the need for a redirect.

The URL is fine.
Refresh you browser and it redirects no problems.

The question is, why doesn't it redirect on the first load?

Any help would be appreciated.

Weedpacket

Oh, okay. I did make an assumption that I shouldn't have: I thought I knew the value of $ThisPHPFile.

Incidentally, [man]header[/man] can take a third parameter that will save you one call.

I make the first request, and no, it doesn't redirect. I get an ordinary 200 response and a single space character for content.

The second time I make the request I got a 301 redirection and the page loads.

The only difference between my two requests is that for the first one I did not have a session cookie, and for the second one I did.

So: what is different about how you handle a request that doesn't include a session ID and a request that does (where is that space character in the first case coming from)?

Kembreg

Weedpacket,

Thanks for you help.

You comment about "How are you handling things the 2nd time" got me thinking.
After about 2 hour I found the error.

On the first load, I was asking "If not set $CountryCode, go get it".
The 2nd time I didn't because it was already set.

Now, in the code the get the country code, there was a space after the ?>

Thanks again.
Goto www.linguashop.com and click contact.
If you want to learn something, let us know.
We're grateful for you help in solving the error.

Kembreg