<-
Apache > HTTP Server > Documentation > Version 2.0 > Modules

Apache Module mod_speling

Description: Attempts to correct mistaken URLs that users might have entered by ignoring capitalization and by allowing up to one misspelling
Status: Extension
Module Identifier: speling_module
Source File: mod_speling.c

Summary

Requests to documents sometimes cannot be served by the core apache server because the request was misspelled or miscapitalized. This module addresses this problem by trying to find a matching document, even after all other modules gave up. It does its work by comparing each document name in the requested directory against the requested document name wHTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2025 08:26:58 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.42 (Win32) PHP/5.2.10 Content-Location: mod_speling.html.en Vary: negotiate TCN: choice Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 6466 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Language: en mod_speling - Apache HTTP Server

<-

Apache Module mod_speling

Description: Attempts to correct mistaken URLs that users might have entered by ignoring capitalization and by allowing up to one misspelling
Status: Extension
Module Identifier: speling_module
Source File: mod_speling.c

Summary

Requests to documents sometimes cannot be served by the core apache server because the request was misspelled or miscapitalized. This module addresses this problem by trying to find a matching document, even after all other modules gave up. It does its work by comparing each document name in the requested directory against the requested document name without regard to case, and allowing up to one misspelling (character insertion / omission / transposition or wrong character). A list is built with all document names which were matched using this strategy.

If, after scanning the directory,

  • no matching document was found, Apache will proceed as usual and return a "document not found" error.
  • only one document is found that "almost" matches the request, then it is returned in the form of a redirection response.
  • more than one document with a close match was found, then the list of the matches is returned to the cli