Regex for route matching in Express

Question

I'm not very good with regular expressions, so I want to make sure I'm doing this correctly. Let's say I have two very similar routes, /discussion/:slug/ and /page/:slug/. I want to create a route that matches both these pages.

app.get('/[discussion|page]/:slug', function(req, res, next) {   ...enter code here... }) 

Is this the correct way to do it? Right now I'm just creating two separate routes.

someFunction = function(req, res, next) {..} app.get('/discussion/:slug', someFunction) app.get('/page/:slug', someFunction) 

Answer 1

app.get('/:type(discussion|page)/:id', ...) works

Answer 2

You should use a literal javascript regular expression object, not a string, and @sarnold is correct that you want parens for alternation. Square brackets are for character classes.

const express = require("express"); const app = express.createServer(); app.get(/^\/(discussion|page)\/(.+)/, function (req, res, next) {   res.write(req.params[0]); //This has "discussion" or "page"   res.write(req.params[1]); //This has the slug   res.end(); });  app.listen(9060); 

The (.+) means a slug of at least 1 character must be present or this route will not match. Use (.*) if you want it to match an empty slug as well.