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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T10:56:42+00:00

I have a small routing engine in PHP. I’m trying to allow it to

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I have a small routing engine in PHP. I’m trying to allow it to optionally match different “formats”, such as requests to “/user/profile.json” or “/user/profile.xml”. However, it should also match just a plain “/user/profile”.

So, if if the format is present, it must be “.json” or “.xml”. But it isn’t required to be present at all.

Here is what I have so far:

#^GET /something/([a-zA-Z0-9\.\-_]+)(\.(html|json))?$#

Obviously, this doesn’t work. This allows any “format” to be requested since the entire format segment is optional. How can I keep it optional, but constrain the formats that can be requested?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    ^GET /something/([a-zA-Z0-9._-]+)(\.(html|json))?$

    allows dots in the first character class, so any file extension is legal. I expect you did that on purpose so filenames with dots in them are possible.

    However, this means that if a filename contains a dot, it must end in either .html or .json. Right?

    So change the regex to (using the \w shorthand for [A-Za-z0-9_]):

    ^GET /something/([\w.-]+\.(html|json)|[\w-]+)$
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