Question

I am trying to create a match for this pattern:

/page/some/thing/is/written/here

where /page is will always match a-zA-Z0-9 and everything after /page can containt the characters a-zA-Z0-9-/
My idea is that “page” always is the page which the user will see, and the rest are parameters, separated by / (p1/p2/p3) etc.

This is what I have come up with: ^([a-zA-Z]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-/]+)$
It works until 3 slashes: page/is/nice

But if I add another parameter like this: page/is/nice/crash
It crashes.

Any suggestions?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Try this:

^/?[a-zA-Z]+(/[A-Za-z0-9]+)*$

Broken down:

• ^ – lead anchor
• /? – it might start with a slash
• [a-zA-Z]+ – one or more letters
• (/[A-Za-z0-9]+)* – zero or more /alphanumerics (with at least one alphanumeric)
• $ – end anchor

If you have no need to capture the ending, you should use non-capturing groups instead:

^/?[a-zA-Z]+(?:/[A-Za-z0-9]+)*$    

If you want an optional slash at the end, try this:

^/?[a-zA-Z]+(?:/[A-Za-z0-9]+)*/?$

Note: You might have to delimit the slashes depending on your programming language.