how to get the regex from the query param input where the delimiter is "&" and even the regex contains "&"?

Question

i have a scenario where i will get input as path and query param and in the place of value i will get a regex.

regex input contains & which is a delimiter in query param.

`Input :` '/austin/query.html?dept=([^&]*)&group=([^&]*)'

i want to get this regex ([^&]*) from query param dynamically.

Any idea or suggestions might be silly / basic question please do help ?

Answer 1

It's important to URL encode query parameters before the request is sent. This helps to avoid issues with characters that have special meaning (?, =, &, #, etc.)

So instead of sending literal ampersand characters & in the regex, it should be URL-encoded to be %26 instead.

/austin/query.html?dept=([^%26]*)&group=([^%26]*)

When this parsed by the querystring module, it will automatically be converted back to the ampersand character.

const querystring = require('querystring');
const URL = require('url');

function parseQueryParamsFromUrlPath(urlPath) {
  const { query } = URL.parse(urlPath);
  return querystring.parse(query);
}

parseQueryParamsFromUrlPath('/austin/query.html?dept=([^%26]*)&group=([^%26]*)');
// Output: { dept: '([^&]*)', group: '([^&]*)' }