Ignore trailing slash in django url regex

Question

I want to catch from all urls like

example.com/<page_path> or example.com/<page_path>/

the <page_path> part. The variable could be empty (redirect to example.com/start) or a path to the desired page (most of the time a simple string, but can also have slashes in it)

This is my current urls.py which seems to work:

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^/$', RedirectView.as_view(url="start"), name='index'),
    url(r'^$', RedirectView.as_view(url="start"), name='index'),
    url(r'^(?P<page>.+)/$', views.PageView.as_view(), name='page'),
    url(r'^(?P<page>.+)$', views.PageView.as_view(), name='page'),
]

But now I tried to simplify the expression and came up with this:

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^/?$', RedirectView.as_view(url="start"), name='index'),
    url(r'^(?P<page>.+)/?$', views.PageView.as_view(), name='page'),
]

I want to capture everything except if there is a trailing slash.

Strange is, this works for

example.com
example.com/
example.com/start

but not for

example.com/start/

Can someone point my error out?

change your urls to : url(r'^(?P<page>[-\w]+)/?$', views.PageView.as_view(), name='page'), — Anush Devendra
– Anush Devendra, Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 11:42
i have only changed the regx. Instead of '.+' use '[-\w]+', this should work. — Anush Devendra
– Anush Devendra, Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 11:55
what @anush said, your current regex is too greedy and is grabbing the slash on the end too as part of page, so there is nothing left for the /? part to work on — Anentropic
– Anentropic, Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 12:42
You don't need r'^/?$, r'^$' will work fine whether you type example.com or example.com/. — Alasdair
– Alasdair, Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 13:23
If you look at the request for http://example.com and http://example.com/ in your logs, you'll see "GET / HTTP/1.1", whether or not you include the slash. Django strips the leading slash from the request before resolving the url. So if you have r'^/$', it will actually match //, which isn't what you want. You don't need a leading slash in r'^$' in the same way as you don't put a leading slash in r'^(?P<page>.+)'. Django 1.9 will check your url patterns for this mistake, and a couple of others. — Alasdair
– Alasdair, Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 13:54

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

3

There is a Django setting called APPEND_SLASH with default value True:

When set to True, if the request URL does not match any of the patterns in the URLconf and it doesn’t end in a slash, an HTTP redirect is issued to the same URL with a slash appended. Note that the redirect may cause any data submitted in a POST request to be lost.

The APPEND_SLASH setting is only used if CommonMiddleware is installed.

Source: Django documentation: Settings

edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Oct 22, 2015 at 11:43

Wtower

20.1k12 gold badges110 silver badges86 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

Simon Lenz Over a year ago

Interesting, but my problem is more the other way around. I want urls that end with a slash and don't match any pattern to be redirected to the same URL without the slash.

Simon Lenz · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-22 13:45:15Z

2

Thanks to your comments I could fix it with this:

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', RedirectView.as_view(url="start"), name='index'),
    url(r'^(?P<page>.+?)/?$', views.PageView.as_view(), name='page'),
]

The + quantifier was too greedy, so I replaced it with the non-greedy version +?.

answered Oct 22, 2015 at 13:45

Simon Lenz

2,8425 gold badges35 silver badges41 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Ignore trailing slash in django url regex

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related