Topic: domain.com/sub.directory.with.dots.in.it/filename.php

[micah]

is this a valid file path?  domain.com/sub.directory.with.dots.in.it/filename.php

it seems to work but I'm worried its, at a minimum not best practice but more so that it will eventually break my site.  While browser compatibility is important, I'm also worried about it breaking in apache.

I have a site that have several alias domain name but I need to store content in a file structure sorted for each domain.

The easiest thing to do would have file paths like:

/var/www/html/domain1.com/
/var/www/html/domain2.com/
/var/www/html/domain3.com/ 

can I have those dots in there?

[hans]

I generally prefer not to use dots in my code as it can have random issues (like content negotiation). I use dashes/underscores instead. But, it's OK as long as your software is designed to handle it correctly. Google does it for their Apps URLs.
e.g.
https://www.google.com/a/domain.com
https://mail.google.com/a/domain.com

[Dumah]

Are we talking about URLs of file paths

Either way I think both can be ok on Linux/Apache but both will probably have a problem if you ported to Windows/IIS (as if you would for PHP...but nevermind)

I would choose not to though...too easy to mistake a folder for a file and extension and usually I can create enough confusion without adding that into the mix!

[micah]

Are we talking about URLs of file paths

Either way I think both can be ok on Linux/Apache but both will probably have a problem if you ported to Windows/IIS (as if you would for PHP...but nevermind)

I would choose not to though...too easy to mistake a folder for a file and extension and usually I can create enough confusion without adding that into the mix!

actually, probably just file paths and not URLs as I intend to mask/alias the directory to the end user

so a link: real-domain.com/sites/domain1.com/files
looks to the end user like: real-domain.com/media/files

I plan to use an .htaccess re-write like this:
RewriteRule ^media/(.*)$ /sites/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1

so actually the browser will never see the period in the file structure (unless at some point I decided to hard-code in the full file path somewhere in the site instead of using the alias)

[Mike]

Don't foresee any problems with it

[micah]

thanks guys!