Javascript regular expression to parse path string

Question

I have an application that shows photos and albums to a user. Based on current state of the application I show appropriate view. Everytime view changes I change the url, controller then gets the url value using window.location.hash

It returns the string of this form:

"photos/byalbum/albumid"
"photos/allphotos"
"photos/eachphoto/albumid/photoid"

My question is how do I parse this using javscript regular expressions to determine which view I should be showing and also to get the parameters (albumId/photoId)

Answer 1

I think you are better off doing this, then regex:

"photos/eachphoto/albumid/photoid".split("/")

Then you get array that you can examine.

Answer 2

Rather than using regex, you should probably simply split the string on "/" and examine each piece of the value for the data that you need.

var urlString = <your returned value here>;
var urlPieces = urlString.split("/");

var view = urlPieces[1];
var album = (urlPieces[2]) ? urlPieces[2] : "";
var photo = (urlPieces[3]) ? urlPieces[3] : "";

Then play with your data as you wish. :)