Question

I’m trying to write a Django URL pattern that matches 1 to n strings separated by slashes. It should match any of these and pass each term to the view:

foo.com/apples
foo.com/apples/oranges
foo.com/oranges/apples/lizards/google_android/adama

In Django I could just pass the entire thing to a view as a string and parse it manually, but I was curious if there is some kind of regex to do this more elegantly.

Answer 1

A regex will always match one substring, not multiple string parts, so it’s not possible for you to get a list instead of a single match.

You should parse the words manually:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^(?P<words>\w+(/\w+)*)/$', myView),
)

def myView(request, words):
    # The URL path /a/b/ will give you the output [u'a', u'b']
    return HttpResponse(str(words.split("/")))

Depending on your use case, each word might have a fixed meaning, such as a date or product category. Then you can probably make some of them optional like so:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^(?P<year>\d\d\d\d)/((?P<month>\d\d)/((?P<day>\d\d)/)?)?$', myView),
)

def myView(request, year, month, day):
    # URL path /2010/ will output year=2010 month=None day=None
    # URL path /2010/01/ will output year=2010 month=01 day=None
    # URL path /2010/01/01/ will output year=2010 month=01 day=01
    return HttpResponse("year=%s month=%s day=%s" % (year, month, day))