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.)

• Niklas Rosencrantz: Thanks! The suggestion would definitely have the advantages of improving readibility and maintainability.