Hello,

Thanks again for your comments.

> This implies, basically, that there are 3 forms of the request
> URI: 1) fully encoded, as in $request_uri, 2) fully decoded, as in
> $uri now, and 3) "all-except-percent-and-reserved". To implement this
> correctly, it needs clear definition when each form is used, and
> it is going to be a non-trivial task to do this safely.

I agree. A simple way to do this would be to make percent-decoding customizable
on a per-directive basis. The core use case I was hoping to support is
preserving encoded reserved characters in location matching (basically what was
proposed in [1]), so that is what I would like to focus on in a reworked
version of this patch.

I propose the following:

(1) The addition of a new variable called $uri_encoded_percent_and_reserved. As
discussed, this variable is a special version of the normalized URI ($uri)
that preserves any percent-encoded "%" or reserved characters.

(2) Every transformation applied to $uri (e.g. from the "rewrite" directive,
internal redirects, etc.) is automatically applied to
$uri_encoded_percent_and_reserved as well.

If this raises performance concerns, a new flag could be added to enable or
disable the availability of $uri_encoded_percent_and_reserved.

(3) The addition of a new optional parameter to the URI form of "location"
blocks called "match-source":

location [ = | ~ | ~* | ^~ ] uri [match-source=uri|uri-encoded-percent-and-reserved] {
...
}

For example:

location ~ ^/api/objects/[^/]+/subobjects(/.*)?$ match-source=uri-encoded-percent-and-reserved {
...
}

"match-source=uri" is the default and the current behaviour. When
"uri-encoded-percent-and-reserved" is used, the location matching for that
block uses $uri_encoded_percent_and_reserved rather than $uri. Nested location
blocks are not affected (unless they also use
"uri-encoded-percent-and-reserved").

In future it would be possible to use a similar pattern with other directives
that use $uri, such as "proxy_pass", but that can be done as part of a separate
patch.

If you think this is a sensible approach, I will submit a revised patch
implementing it.

Thanks,

Michael Kourlas

[1] https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/2225
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