How to redirect // in Laravel 5.7?

Older version of laravel here, 5.7. I have a situation where I have a url like this http://127.0.0.1:8000//

I have a catch all of this

Route::get('{uri}', ['uses'=>'PageController@render'])->where('uri', '(.*)');

The URL that comes into the render method is ''. I'm not quite sure the best way to take http://127.0.0.1:8000// and redirect that to http://127.0.0.1:8000.

.htaccess doesn't seem to let me redirect that either with Redirect 301 // / or RewriteRule ^$ /? [L,R=301]

Is there any way to get around this?

thanks!

via Chebli Mohamed