Regexes for Google App Engine

Question

I want to review the URL routing for my appengine webapp:

routes = [
        (r'/', CyberFazeHandler),
        (r'/vi/(eyes|mouth|nose)', CyberFazeHandler),
        (r'/realtime', RealtimeHandler),
        (r'/task/refresh-user/(.*)', RefreshUserHandler),
        ('/ai', FileUploadFormHandler),
        ('/serve/([^/]+)?', ServeHandler),
        ('/upload', FileUploadHandler),
        ('/generate_upload_url', GenerateUploadUrlHandler),
        ('/file/([0-9]+)', FileInfoHandler),
        ('/file/set/([0-9]+)', SetCategoryHandler),
        ('/file/([0-9]+)/download', FileDownloadHandler),
        ('/file/([0-9]+)/success', AjaxSuccessHandler),
        ]

app = webapp2.WSGIApplication(routes,
            debug=os.environ.get('SERVER_SOFTWARE', '').startswith('Dev'
            ))

Does it look alright to you? Can you recommend an improvement? Should I use the 'r prefix to my regexes?

Answer 1

Have you considered using named Route templates instead of capturing regular expressions? It could make the code more readable. Consider

Route("/task/refresh-user/<username>", RefreshUserHandler)

instead of

(r'/task/refresh-user/(.*)', RefreshUserHandler)

for example. (Of course, I don't know what kwargs RefreshUser actually wants, but you can change the angle-bracketed part to the appropriate name.)