Question

More than a long talk to explain that bug, here’s a screenshot that explains everything :

As soon as we enter an “e” inside the url which correspond to rss_category, it no longer match the route. See :
!

We resolved this by forcing a requirements for {slugCat} to accept anything .^ (they were no requirements before)

If that can help someone somday, and if anyone has a valid explanation, i’ll be glad to hear (runing under Symfony 2.1.1).

Answer 1

Wow, difficult one. This happens because when compiling the route, symfony tries to use the character preceeding the variable name as a separator. This code is from RouteCompiler.php:

            // Use the character preceding the variable as a separator
            $separators = array($match[0][0][0]);

            if ($pos !== $len) {
                // Use the character following the variable as the separator when available
                $separators[] = $pattern[$pos];
            }
            $regexp = sprintf('[^%s]+', preg_quote(implode('', array_unique($separators)), self::REGEX_DELIMITER));

Symfony does this because usually you will have some kind of separator before the variable name, a route like /upload/rssArticle/{slugCat}, where ‘/’ would be the separator and it is trying to be helpful by letting you use this separator to separate variables in routes which contain several variables. In your case, the character before the variable is an ‘e’ and that character becomes a separator and that is why your route does not match. If your route had beed /upload/rssArticles{slugCat}, then the ‘s’ would be the separator and that would be the character you would not be able to use.

Maybe you could create an issue on the symfony router component. I think that the preceeding character should not be used as a separator if it is a letter or a number.