Hi all,
I had this in my Dancer code:
get '/instance/?:id?' => sub {
my $id = param('id');
...
};
That let's me do this:
http://localhost:5000/instance # get a list of instances
http://localhost:5000/instance/ # get a list of instances
http://localhost:5000/instance/213 # get instance 213
However, after I typoed a URL, I discovered that it would also match:
http://localhost:5000/instances # get instance 's'
This is because of the generated regex:
/^\/instance\/?([^\/]+)?$/
I've fixed this by switching to regex paths, but I would argue for the
following to be the regex generated from my example above:
/^\/instance(?:\/([^\/]+))?$/
In other words, if you have multiple "optional" components in a path, they are
all required up to, but excluding, the last optional component found in the URL
that is accessed. You could then safely visit /instance, /instance/, and
/instance/42.
This would allow the easy construction of things like this:
/member/?:member_id?/?:tag_id?
Allowing you to access:
/member
/member/
/member/3
/member/3/
/member/3/7
This would make it easy to write the sort of URLs that I often write.
Speculation: at that point, if we have an optional component, we could *assume*
that the preceding / must be optional (?), leading to a simple URL:
/member/:member_id?/:tag_id?
Once something optional is found, nothing after it may be mandatory (otherwise,
if you had optional items collapsing out of the URL, it would be a semantic
mess that's impossible to sort through).
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Ovid
--
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