[Discuss] Having trouble browsing a backed-up MediaWiki (PHP) site.

[Alan W. Irwin]

I have used wget to back up a MediaWiki site
(http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) we are
using to keep track of how to build PLplot.

The files backed up to my local disk are called, e.g.,

irwin at chickadee> ls *Main_Page
index.php?title=Main_Page
index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Main_Page
index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&returnto=Main_Page
index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Main_Page

If I go into that file directory using konqueror as a file browser (not an
html browser) and click on the location bar to bring up a table of contents
these same file names are presented as choices.  If I click on one of them,
after the page is loaded, the URL in the location bar is changed to, e.g.,

index.php%3Ftitle=Main_Page

and so on.  That is all occurrences of "?" are replaced with the safe
character version "%3f".  So far, so good.  However, if I click on any links
in the document that were downloaded (I used the wget --convert-links
option), then it uses the "unsafe" file location (e.g.,
/home/irwin/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) which it cannot find
until I edit the location bar to change "?" to "%3f" (e.g.,
/home/irwin/plplot_wiki/index.php%3Ftitle=Main_Page).

I get virtually similar behaviour from firefox (except it does not allow me
the opportunity of substituting "%3F" for "?" on the location bar; it simply
says it cannot find the clicked file with a popup).

So here are some questions:

(1) Can I configure konqueror (or firefox) to allow question marks in file
href's without having to manually edit them to the safe form, "%3F"?

(2) If (1) has no good answer, then another possibility is to locally follow
what the http://www.miscdebris.net server is doing so that the hrefs are
interpreted properly.  I already have a local version of apache running, but
my apache experience is pretty limited, and I know nothing about setting up
PHP for apache.  As a first experiment, I tried moving the wgetted directory
to my public_html directory, and browsed
http://localhost/~irwin/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page, but my
browser thought that file was a plain text file which it tried to open with
KWrite (?) rather than displaying it.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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