Need a Rails route with a possible period in the :id, but also retain the optional :format

Question

I have a Rails route that takes stock ticker symbols as the :id

• feeds/AMZN will return a page for Amazon
• feeds/AMZN.csv will ret

Answer 1

I ran into this while patching the RubyGems API recently (trying to access the flickr.rb using the API (/api/v1/gems/flickr.rb.json) was not working).

The trick was to supply the route with a regexp to handle the :id parameter, and then specify valid :format. Keep in mind that the :id regexp needs to be "lazy" (must end with a question mark), otherwise it will eat the .csv and assume that it's part of the id. The following example would allow JSON, CSV, XML, and YAML formats for an id with a period in it:

resources :feeds, :id => /[A-Za-z0-9\.]+?/, :format => /json|csv|xml|yaml/