Why would you need a slash at the end of a URL?

Question

Is there a difference between these URLs in regards to having slashes at the end of the URL?

https://drchrono.com/about_us
https://drchrono.com/about_us/

Do web frameworks and web servers (e.g. Apache, Nginx, Django) handle these requests differently?

Small note: those are forward slashes, not backslashes. – Jon Skeet Sep 21 '09 at 21:28 — Jon Skeet, Sep 21 '09 at 21:28

RichieHindle · Answer 1 · 2009-09-21T22:15:29.287

29

The browser will treat them differently when it comes to relative URLs. A page at:

http://server/path

with a relative link like:

<a href='other'>

will resolve that link to:

http://server/other

replacing path with other. Whereas if the starting URL was:

http://server/path/

then the resolved link would be:

http://server/path/other

If path is a directory rather than a file, most web servers will automatically redirect from:

http://server/path

to:

http://server/path/

because that's almost certainly what you meant.

edited Sep 21 '09 at 22:15

answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:29

RichieHindle

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because of that automatic redirect, if you write your links with the trailing slash, you will achieve a minimal but noticeable speedup of your page loads. IIRC, the apache docs recommend this. – rmeador Sep 21 '09 at 22:07

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:28

5

In Django URLs without forward slashes automatically have a forward slash appended to them. This is a preference of the Django developers and not a hard-coded rule of the web (I think it's actually a setting in Django).

answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:28

Kai

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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:28

/ is the separation character.

From the RFC

Some URL schemes (such as the ftp, http, and file schemes) contain names that can be considered hierarchical; the components of the hierarchy are separated by "/".

Having a / at the end states that there might be more stuff in the url.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:38

2

Just a side note that search engines view these as 2 different pages. Thus hurting your seo.

answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:38

corymathews

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score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 21 '09 at 21:28

They are handled as different requests, although they might match the same resource/handler/routine at the end and be processed in the same way.

As the one with / is supposed to be something similar to a directory, all relative links will be inside the / i.e. previous/target/something ... while the one without will have the relative links be at the same level previous/something.

Why would you need a slash at the end of a URL?

5 Answers5

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