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Rails 1.2 breaks url routing with dots?

This last week we’ve spent migrating Planypus from Rails 1.1.6 to the latest 1.2.1 release. Unfortunately the Rails 1.2 rewrite of the routing system leaves something to be desired. Apparently, the dot “.” (period) character is now considered a route separator, causing routes that have dots in them to break badly. Why is this bad? Well let’s say you were routing based on numbers, like lat/long coordinates..oops! Broken! Or, let’s say you were displaying users by their email (gmail has a prevalence of dots). Broken! I still love Rails, don’t get me wrong, but shouldn’t this sort of breakage be advertised just a little more loudly? Well here I am, yelling :-)

I believe this can be fixed with the “:require” parameter. See this post for details:

http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=116742

Thanks! That fixed it right up :-). For those too lazy to click through, the trick is to add a :requirements => {:yourparam => /.*/} to make it recognize dots in yourparam.

[...] Sobre Rails 1.2, é bom saber que o esquema de carga de plugins mudou, para melhor, como já falamos em outros posts, mas aqui estão os detalhes. Outra dica para quem está atualizando é tomar cuidado com pontos em rotas. [...]

Rails 1.2 routes and the dot “.”…

Rails 1.2 came with great new features. One of them was the REST able applications. Other was the ability to serve results based on how the request was made. So you could send different results for controller/action.html, controller/action.xml or conto…

[...] 4. (Not related to fixtures at all) In Rails, “.” in a (URL) path is a “route separator“, so it doesn’t behave like you expect by default. The fix is to add something like: [...]