Are unnecessary slashes in a URL bad?

I noticed that https://stackoverflow.com//////////questions/4659504/ is a valid URL. However https://www.google.com//////////analytics/settings is not. 开发者_开发问答Are there differences inherent in web server technologies that explain this? Should a url with unnecessary slashes be interpreted correctly or should it return an error?

First of all, adding a slash changes the semantics of a URL path like any other character does. So by definition /foo/bar and /foo//bar are not equivalent just as /foo/bar and /foo/bar/ are not equivalent.

But since the URL path is mostly used to be directly mapped onto the file system, web servers often remove empty path segments (Apache does that) so that /foo//bar and /foo/bar are handled equivalently. But this is not the expected behavior; it’s rather done for error correction.

They are both valid URLs.
However, Google's server can't handle the second one.

There is no specific reason to either handle or reject URLs with duplicate slashes; you should spend more time on more important things.

What do you consider "interpreted correctly"? HTTP only really specifices how the stuff in front of the slash after the server name gets interpreted. The rest is entirely up to the web server. It parses what you give it after that point (in whatever manner it likes) and presents you with whatever HTML it feels like providing for that text.

There is a difference in how every application processes requests. If you setup your app to replace succeeding slashes before routing the request you shouldn't have any problems.