Question

Does anyone know how to make the Backbone routes case insensitive?

I.E.
http://localhost/Products
http://localhost/products

both trigger the products route

routes: {
    "products": "products"
},

---

Update

Based on mu is too short’s answer, here is the full Router. Thanks for your help

MainRouter = Backbone.Router.extend({
    routes: {
        "": "home",
        "products": "products"
    },

    initialize: function () {
        Backbone.history.start({ pushState: true });
    },

    home: function () {
        // just show the products!!
        this.products();
    },

    products: function () {

        // wire up the view.
        var ps = new ProductsView({ el: '#products', collection: myCollection });
        ps.render();

        // fetch the collection!!
        myCollection.fetch();
    },

    _routeToRegExp: function (route) {
        route = route.replace(this.escapeRegExp, "\\$&")
               .replace(this.namedParam, "([^\/]*)")
               .replace(this.splatParam, "(.*?)");

        return new RegExp('^' + route + '$', 'i'); // Just add the 'i'
    }
});

Answer 1

You could bind all your routes manually with Backbone.Router.route(), that will accept the route as a string or a RegExp object:

Backbone.Router.route(/products/i, ...

Or you could replace this private method in Backbone.Router while subclassing (via Backbone.Router.extend(), thank you Crescent Fresh):

_routeToRegExp : function(route) {
  route = route.replace(escapeRegExp, "\\$&")
               .replace(namedParam, "([^\/]*)")
               .replace(splatParam, "(.*?)");
  return new RegExp('^' + route + '$');
}

with this one (you’ll have to copy/expand the escapeRegExp namedParam, and splatParam regexes too):

_routeToRegExp : function(route) {
  route = route.replace(/[-[\]{}()+?.,\\^$|#\s]/g, "\\$&")
               .replace(/:\w+/g, "([^\/]*)")
               .replace(/\*\w+/g, "(.*?)");
  return new RegExp('^' + route + '$', 'i'); // Just add the 'i'
}

The routes in the routes object are added to the routing table using Backbone.Router.route() and that converts them to regexes using _routeToRegExp.

Here’s a demo of the _routeToRegExp approach: http://jsfiddle.net/ambiguous/MDSC5/