301 redirect instead of 404 when URL is a prefix of a post or page name?

  • hey all! i have an odd problem with URL routing. i’ve searched the forums, codex, and web, but no luck, so i’m hoping one of you can help!

    when i request a URL that doesn’t exist, e.g. https://localhost/foo, wordpress correctly returns a 404. however, if that URL is a prefix of a post or page name, it instead returns a 301 redirect to the post or page.

    for example, if i have a post on 10/1/2010 named Food Post, it will return a 301 with Location: https://localhost/2010-10-01_food_post (my permalink structure). likewise, if i have a page named Food Page, it will return a 301 with Location: https://localhost/food_page.

    you can see this in action on my live site, https://snarfed.org/ . e.g. https://snarfed.org/foo redirects to https://snarfed.org/2009-10-30_food_highlights .

    i see this on two different installations, both wordpress 3.0.1 and apache 2.2, one ubuntu lucid/mysql 5.1 and one freebsd 7.3/mysql 5.0. i’ve deactivated all plugins and removed everything from my .htaccess except the lines for wordpress below, verbatim, but no luck.


    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^wordpress/index\.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]

    any ideas? thanks in advance…

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • {REQUEST_FILENAME} is the full path to the target file/sript. So you could have an extended path included in the URL but it will still rewrite to /wordpress/index.php

    Thread Starter Ryan

    (@snarfed)

    thanks! i don’t think that’s related, though. i removed those two RewriteCond lines, and i still see this behavior.

    Thread Starter Ryan

    (@snarfed)

    i asked this on wordpress.stackexchange.com, and jan fabry came to my rescue. thanks jan!

    for the record, here’s answer:

    “This is normal, it is because redirect_canonical(), which makes sure you are always at a “canonical” URL (conforming to your permalink structure), executes redirect_guess_404_permalink() to make a best guess at a post when the URL is incomplete. If you want to prevent this, I think the best way is to hook into the redirect_canonical filter, and return false if it is a 404. Something like this:”

    add_filter('redirect_canonical', 'no_redirect_on_404');
function no_redirect_on_404($redirect_url) {
    if (is_404()) {
        return false;
    }
    return $redirect_url;
}
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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