Rails Routing: how to separate a token from surrounding static segments

Question

I'm having one of those bizarre "this used to work and then it stopped working" issues.

In my routes file I have

    controller :questions do
        match 'q/:topic-questions/:tag' => :search
    end

So a URL of format q/java-questions/performance would route to the search action with params[:topic] = java and params[:tag] = performance

This used to work, but now I get a route not found error. If I switch to

match 'q/(:topic)-questions/:tag' => :search

it finds the route again, but I don't want topic to be an optional parameter. I think this implies that it's having trouble separating out :topic-questions into a token and then a static string. If there another way to neatly separate out the token, other then putting it in ()?

Note - the reason why topic cannot be an optional parameter, is that optional parameters are not included in the cache keys when doing action caching.

Answer 1

what about:

controller :questions do
    match 'q/:topic-:modifier/:tag' => :search
end

then you would have three parameters

params[:topic]
params[:modifier]
params[:tag]

and you could then ignore the params[:modifier] one.