php htaccess url encode/decode remove trailing slash

Question

I'm using .htaccess to remove trailing slash from URI:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L]

The website is built with Codeigniter and has three languages, where russian is one of them, that uses cyrillic chars in URI.I use urlencode for generating routes and urldecode to find the right page from database by URI.

Removing trailing slash works fine with english and german languages, but when I try add trailing slash to URI where cyrillic chars are used, I get 404 page. URI after removing / seems correct, but I can't understand why I get 404, the URL is the same as entered without trailing slash.

Answer 1

Use NE flag for not encoding:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+?)/$ $1 [R=301,L,NE]