Period as separator in Edge Rails routes

rubyonrails-talk
1

We have an application where one part of many routes is a user name. This user name may contain one or more periods, like so:

  http://domain.name/typical.user/messages

This of course works nicely in Rails 1.1. But in Edge Rails, the period is a routing character signifying the choosing of data representations.

Is there a way of turning off this behaviour? We do not want to have to URL-encode our usernames.

  / Peter Bengtson

2

The more I look into this, the more it looks like a Rails bug. In a route such as the following:

  map.connect '/foo/:login/bar/baz', :controller => 'whatever'

why should matching fail at all when the value for :login contains a period? Only if the route was written:

  map.connect '/foo/:login.:format/bar/baz, ...

would it be any point in parsing for a period as a separator. Moreover, is there really any point in interpreting a period in input data unless the data comes _last_ in the URL?

  / Peter Bengtson

3

Doesn't anybody have any clue about this???