Regular expressions and webapp2 routes

A webapp2.WSGIApplication object that invokes the MainPage handler when any request is made might look like this:

app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([('.*', MainPage)])

One that runs when a path consists of nothing but digits might look like this:

app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([('/[0-9]+', PostPage)])

And here is one that sends those digits as an argument to the PostPage handler:

app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([('/([0-9]+)', PostPage)])

In each of these examples, a single route is expressed as tuple where the first element of the tuple is a regular expression that represents the path to be matched to the incoming URL request.

Here they are again:

.*           Any string
[0-9]+       One or more occurences of the digits 0 to 9
([0-9]+)     ...and capture those digits for later use

Here are some more:

.             Any character
.?            0 or 1 occurence of any character
a?            0 or 1 occurence of the character 'a'
[a-z]         Any lowercase letter
[^a-z]        Any character that is not a lowercase letter
[a-z]+        One or more occurrences of any lowercase character
[a-zA-Z0-9]   Any alphanumeric character
\w            The same as [a-zA-Z0-9_], i.e. all alphanumeric characters and the underscore
\s            Any whitespace character (a space, a tab or a newline)
\d            Any digit, the same as [0-9]
\d+           One or more digits       
\d{4}         Exactly four digits
\w{3,20}      Between 3 and 20 alphanumeric characters and underscores
[\w-]         Any alphanumeric character or an underscore or a hyphen
(   )         Capture whatever is in parentheses for later use

If you use more than one set of parentheses in a route then the captured expressions are passed in order as arguments to the handler.

app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([( '/posts/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d{2})' , PostPage )])

Which matches a path like:

/posts/2014/04/30

And sends ‘2014’, ‘04’ and ‘30’ in order as arguments to the PostPage handler.