Routable

Routable is a lightweight regular expression inspired HTTP route parser for Node.js. It only has one goal and that is to match and parse URL's for frameworks.

Installation

The module is released in the npm registry as routable:

npm install --save routable

The --save automatically adds the routable module to your package.json.

Getting started

All the examples in this getting started assume that you have included the module in your code and exposed it as a Routable variable:

'use strict';
 
var Routable = require('routable');

To create a new route simply construct a new Routable instance with an URL pattern:

var foo = new Routable('/foo');

There are different patterns that can be used for testing against URL's. Routable supports testing against strings, Regular Expressions and even xRegExp based expressions. See patterns for more details.

Now that you've created your first Routable instance you can use it to test against URL's. To see if a URL matches the your Routable instance you can use the Routable#test method:

Routable.test(url)

Just like the RegularExpression.test method, it returns a boolean indicating if the given string matches the expression or not. The same is true for Routable but instead of testing a Regular Express you're testing your pattern.

var foo = new Routable('/foo');
 
foo.test('/bar');   // false;
foo.test('/foo');   // true;
foo.test('/fooo');  // false;

While quickly testing an URL is useful sometimes you also want to parse out the information from the URL. If you have a capturing or named Regular Expression or string you can use the routable#exec

Routable.exec(url)

With normal RegularExpression.exec you can either undefined or an Array with results as return value. With a Routable instance you still get undefined when there isn't a match but instead of an array you receive an Object.

var foobar = new Routable('/foo/:bar');
 
var res = foobar.exec('/foo/foo');
 
console.log(res.bar); // 'foo'

Patterns

• Regular Expressions /\/foo/.
• Capturing Regular Expressions /\/(foo|bar)\/bar/.
• Capturing strings /foo/:bar/1/:baz.
• Optional parameters /foo/:bar?.
• Plain strings /foo/bar

License

MIT