austinbooth Posted September 6, 2011 Share Posted September 6, 2011 Hello! I've got a problem with loading the activate.php file for chapter 16. My browser will load a page such as 'localhost/htdocs/index.php However it will not load a page such as 'localhost/htdocs/register.php%3Fx=austintest1%2540localhost&y=2866cbd29d8e0c66386cae06baa82310' and instead shows the following error: Access forbidden! You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. Error 403 localhost 06/09/2011 01:18:18 Apache/2.2.17 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.17 OpenSSL/0.9.8o PHP/5.3.4 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1 I am assuming this is because of some security setting in Apache, but am not sure. I am running XAMPP 1.7.4 Please help! Austin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HartleySan Posted September 6, 2011 Share Posted September 6, 2011 Hmmm, never seen that before. Although, the htdocs folder is your localhost by default, so maybe all you need in the browser's URL bar is localhost/index.php, instead of localhost/htdocs/index.php. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry Posted September 6, 2011 Share Posted September 6, 2011 The problem is most likely because your URL has index.php followed by %3F, whereas that should be a question mark. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
austinbooth Posted September 6, 2011 Author Share Posted September 6, 2011 Hi HartleySan and Larry, thanks for your replies. HartleySan: I copied the web address wrongly, it doesn't have 'htdocs' in it, so that can't be the problem. Larry: Chrome put the %3F in instead of a question mark. When I rectify this and load it in IE I get the same error. Out of desperation I've completely uninstalled Xampp, then reinstalled it, tested it etc, created my database again. I still get the same error. However all the other pages work fine though and I can register a new user and receive the email via Mercury. Very strange and annoying! Austin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry Posted September 7, 2011 Share Posted September 7, 2011 Okay, for starters, I would definitely NOT uninstall and reinstall XAMPP every time you have a problem. The %3F is the entity version of the question mark. You need the actual question mark there. Chrome did not put the %3F there, but something did. Try using that same URL with a question mark instead of %3F. That should work. Then either the PHP code or your mail client is causing the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
austinbooth Posted September 7, 2011 Author Share Posted September 7, 2011 Okay, I've found the problems after a lot of debugging! Firstly, the reg expression in the book, ^[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,6}$, doesn't work with the email I had set up to test this (austintest1@localhost) as it's expecting 1 or more . after the @ symbol. Changing the +\. to *\. should rectify this, although I haven't tested it yet. However when I include a . (ie. austintest1@local.host, with the dot encoded as %2E) it works. Secondly, there was a problem with my BASE_URL set up in the config.inc.php file, so when the script judged my email to be no good it was redirecting via a very dodgy URL. Everything is now working, phew! Thanks HartleySan and Larry for your assistance. Austin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry Posted September 7, 2011 Share Posted September 7, 2011 You're quite welcome. Kudos for figuring it out and thanks for letting us know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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