Custom router URL using a string begning with "#" as a variable

Question

I have a custom router that was built more or less using the method described in this post from Stack Overflow. It works quite well and I haven't had any problems with it until I decided that I wanted to use a variable that started with "#". Before my url structure would be:

mysite.com/gallery/variablehere

What I'm going for now is:

mysite.com/gallery/#variablehere

The problem is that magento is recognizing this as a link to an element with that ID on the page instead of that being the variable. Because of this, it routes to /gallery/index instead of the layout that I want. The function that checks for a match and sets the parameter:

public function match(Zend_Controller_Request_Http $request){
 $urlKey = trim($request->getPathInfo(), '/');
 $check = array();
 $parts = explode('/', $urlKey);
 ....
 ...
 ..
}

Doesn't even seem to get run. Does anyone know a way to get the router to recognize that as a valid variable and not just have it render the index layout automatically? Thanks for any help you might be able to give!

Answer 1

If you do not URL encode the pound signs, they don't get sent to the server. This is Url 101.

The # marks the start of the in page reference (like footnotes or pager ToC sections, marked up by <a name="footnote" />) and is if no concern to the server, since the browser can do all the work.

Some front-end Ajax frameworks have adopted this convention, but parse the browser location to adjust their behavior. At the time it was a smart idea, since it falls back gracefully, but as you see, integrating it with a server becomes a lot harder.