1. Home
  2. Documentation
  3. Cookbook
  4. Routing
  5. How to Allow a "/" Character in a Route Parameter
WARNING: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 2.3 which is not maintained anymore. Consider upgrading your projects to Symfony 5.0.

How to Allow a "/" Character in a Route Parameter

2.3 version
Unmaintained
2.0 2.1 2.2 2.4 2.5 2.6

How to Allow a "/" Character in a Route Parameter

Sometimes, you need to compose URLs with parameters that can contain a slash /. For example, take the classic /hello/{username} route. By default, /hello/Fabien will match this route but not /hello/Fabien/Kris. This is because Symfony uses this character as separator between route parts.

This guide covers how you can modify a route so that /hello/Fabien/Kris matches the /hello/{username} route, where {username} equals Fabien/Kris.

Configure the Route

By default, the Symfony Routing component requires that the parameters match the following regex path: [^/]+. This means that all characters are allowed except /.

You must explicitly allow / to be part of your parameter by specifying a more permissive regex path.

  • Annotations
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
    use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route;

class DemoController
{
    /**
     * @Route("/hello/{username}", name="_hello", requirements={"username"=".+"})
     */
    public function helloAction($username)
    {
        // ...
    }
}
  • YAML
    1
2
3
4
5
    _hello:
    path:     /hello/{username}
    defaults: { _controller: AppBundle:Demo:hello }
    requirements:
        username: .+
  • XML
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<routes xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/routing"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/routing http://symfony.com/schema/routing/routing-1.0.xsd">

    <route id="_hello" path="/hello/{username}">
        <default key="_controller">AppBundle:Demo:hello</default>
        <requirement key="username">.+</requirement>
    </route>
</routes>
  • PHP
     1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
    use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;

$collection = new RouteCollection();
$collection->add('_hello', new Route('/hello/{username}', array(
    '_controller' => 'AppBundle:Demo:hello',
), array(
    'username' => '.+',
)));

return $collection;

That's it! Now, the {username} parameter can contain the / character.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.