URIs with german special characters don't work (error 404) in Zend Framework 2

Question

I want to get a list of cities, where each city name is linked and refers a page for this city:

Answer 1

You need to change your constraints, you can use a regular expression which will match UTF8 characters, something like this:

'/[\p{L}]+/u'

Notice the /u modifier (unicode).

EDIT:

The problem is resolved.

Explanation:

The RegEx Route maches the URIs with preg_match(...) (line 116 or 118 of Zend\Mvc\Router\Http\Regex). In order to mach a string with "special chars" (128+) one must pass the pattern modifier u to preg_match(...). Like this:

$thisRegex = '/catalog/(?<city>[\p{L}]*)';
$regexStr = '(^' . $thisRegex . '$)u'; // <-- here
$path = '/catalog/Nürnberg';
$matches = array();
preg_match($regexStr, $path, $matches);

And since RegEx Route passes a url-enccoded string to preg_match(...), it's furthermode needed to decode the string first:

$thisRegex = '/catalog/(?<city>[\p{L}]*)';
$regexStr = '(^' . $thisRegex . '$)u';
$path = rawurldecode('/catalog/N%C3%BCrnberg');
$matches = array();
preg_match($regexStr, $path, $matches);

These two steps are not provided in the RegEx Route, so that preg_match(...) gets a steing like '/catalog/N%C3%BCrnberg' and tries to mach it to a regex like '/catalog/(?<city>[\\p{L}]*)/u'

The solution is to use a custom RegEx Route. Here is an example.