Why do routes with a dot in a parameter fail to match?

Question

I've got an route for my users like /iGEL/contributions, which works fine. But now a user registered with a name like 'A.and.B.', and now the route fails to match, since the name contains dots.

My route:

get "/:user/contributions" => 'users#contributions'

Any ideas?

Answer 1

See the blue info box here:

By default dynamic segments don’t accept dots – this is because the dot is used as a separator for formatted routes. If you need to use a dot within a dynamic segment add a constraint which overrides this – for example :id => /[^\/]+/ allows anything except a slash.

That would for example be:

get "/:user/contributions" => 'users#contributions', :constraints => { :user => /[^\/]+/ }

Answer 2

If your variable segment is the last one, then using the [^\/] regex will also eat the format. In such a case rather use:

/([^\/]+?)(?=\.json|\.html|$|\/)/