Laravel - Proper way to support a URL piece that might have a slash in it?

Question

I've defined a route in web.php that looks like this:

Route::delete('/app/charges-for-order/{orderId}', 'AppController@deleteOrderCharges');

It seems to work well apart from when orderId has a forward slash in it. Eg 11/11.

Naturally my first port of call was to generate the url in the frontend using encodeURIComponent:

/app/charges-for-order/${encodeURIComponent(orderId)} (in javascript)

Which produces the url /app/charges-for-order/11%2F11, replacing the forward slash with %2F -- however, this is giving me a 404, as if Laravel is still seeing %2F as a forward slash for routing purposes.

How can I allow orderId to have (encoded) forward slashes and still be part of the URL like that? Is there some alternate encoding scheme that Laravel will respect in this context?

Answer 1

I assume you are using Apache as HTTP server? At least Apache is by default decoding %2F behind your back: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#allowencodedslashes

Changing this might be a bad idea, so I would suggest you would change your route to match all:

Route::delete('/app/charges-for-order/{orderId}', 'AppController@deleteOrderCharges')
     ->where('orderId', '.+');

Answer 2

Use where() clause in route file. Which allows you to use RegEx in the file.

->where('orderId', '^[0-9/]+$'); # or
->where('orderId', '[0-9/]+'); # this

Read - Regular Expression Constraints

IMPORTANT: Do not use ->where('orderId', '.*') or ->where('orderId', '.') any cost.

Side Note: I'm not debugging the DELETE route works or not, just testing whether you can pass params. As well, if you found extensive RegEx, use it. I used this for testing purposes, but still, it does the job

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I tested with http://127.0.0.1:8090/app/charges-for-order/11/11 in my local, and the result was

Answer 3

I ended up just changing the methods in question to accept query parameters or post data instead, I was having trouble with the other answers.