Regex pattern to capture all folders in URL including forward slash

Question

I want to match dynamically created URLs which can have multiple folders. Need some regex pattern for this. For ex.

http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/:user_id/:foldersa/:folders1/
http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/:user_id/:foldersb/:folders2/:folders3/:folders4
http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/:user_id/:foldersc/:folders2/
http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/:user_id/:foldersd/:folders1/:folders2/

so till BASE_URL/api/:user_id/ is common. I can catch user_id but want to catch other params after user_id on a single string variable.
after that, there can be any number of folders and I want to catch them all in one single string variable.
like for first URL string variable caught will be "foldera/folder1/" and for next url string variable will be "folderb/folder2/folder3/folder4" along with fwd slashes.

What regex pattern should I write in urls.py for capturing this folders?
I tried with re_path(r'(?P<user_id>[-\w]+)/(?P<customUrl>(.*?)(?:\/)?$)/.*', customLink, name='customLink'),

but couldn't get it to work.

Answer 1

You can match all but the last optional trailing slash:

re_path(r'(?P<user_id>[-\w]+)/(?P<custom_url>.*?)/?$', customLink, name='customLink'),

in the view you can then split the endpoints with:

def customLink(request, user_id, custom_url):
    endpoints = custom_url.split('/')
    # …

You can also make use of a path converter:

# app_name/converters.py

class EndpointsConverter:
    regex = ".*?"
    
    def to_python(self, value):
        return value.split('/')
    
    def to_url(self, value):
        if isinstance(value, str):
            return value
        return '/'.join(value)

then you can work with a path converter:

from django.urls import path, register_converter
from app_name.converters import EndpointsConverter

register_converter(EndpointsConverter, 'endpoints')

urlpatterns = [
    path('<str:user_id>/<endpoints:endpoints>/', customLink, name='customLink'),
    # …
]

this will automatically split (and join) the endpoints by the slashes.