Question

I’m using python GAE with webapp.

I have a form for a user to create a object in the database, something like:

class SpamRecord(db.Model):
    author = db.ReferenceProperty(Author, required=True)
    text = db.StringProperty()

After it’s created, the user is redirected to a page whose URL contains that object’s key… using code such as:

spam = SpamRecord(author=author, text=text)
spam.put()
new_spam_key = spam.key()
self.redirect("/view_spam/%s" % new_spam_key)

And this mostly works, with me being able to view items at:

sitename.com/view_spam/ag1waWNreXByZXNlbnRzchQLEgxBbm5vdW5jZW1lbnQYy8oJDA
sitename.com/view_spam/ag1waWNreXByZXNlbnRzchQLEgxBbm5vdW5jZW1lbnQY_boJDA

However, there’s an occasional key that won’t work. Here are 2 recent examples of pages that won’t load and return HTTP 404 not found errors:

sitename.com/view_spam/ag1waWNreXByZXNlbnRzchQLEgxBbm5vdW5jZW1lbnQY-5MJDA
sitename.com/view_spam/ag1waWNreXByZXNlbnRzchQLEgxBbm5vdW5jZW1lbnQY-boJDA

My html-mappings.py contains the following mapping:

(r"/view_spam/(\w+)", ViewSpamPage)

And the ViewSpamPage looks something like:

class ViewSpamPage(webapp.RequestHandler):
    def get(self, spam_id):
        self.response.out.write("Got here")

Can anyone offer any insight as to why this is occurring and how it may be prevented?

Thanks very much!

Answer 1

In regular expressions, \w doesn’t match hyphens. (It will match underscores.) For that second pair of keys, this’ll result in only passing part of the key to your handler.

In your URL pattern, try r"/view_spam/(.*)" instead.