hash - do browsers remove # in URL automatically?

Question

our front end guy needs to form a url containing the hash, (i.e, http://blah/#some-link.) when we hit this on the browser and inspect the http traffic using fiddler, we saw that everything after blah/ gets removed, so the request is really just http://blah/. we also confirmed this on our server eclipse debug log.

the request gets redirected to the correct login page by Spring security(because user hasn't logged in), but the url on the browser now shows: http://blah/some-link (the hash got removed) but the url on the browser should really be http://blah/log-in.

any idea why this is? any fix or workaround? thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Content after the # is only used on the client side, per HTTP specification. If you require that information on the server, you can either use a different separator, or you can submit it via ajax after the page has loaded by reading it on the client with javascript.