How to obtain route information in angular from url string - angularjs

Question

Anyone knows if there is a tool (or a built-in feature) in angular to obtain a route object from an url string?
Example
I set up route navigation like this:
$routeProvider
.when('/users/:id',
{
templateUrl: 'components/users/edit.html',
controller: 'UsersCtrl',
access: {
requiresLogin: true,
roles: ['Admin']
}
});
I do have a string like /users/2 and i want to be able to obtain the route object asociated with that string, the object containing templateUrl, controller and access properties.
I can see all the routes defined in $route.routes, but the routes there are in the format /users/:id, so I would have to resolve the url manually.
The purpose of this is to secure ui-elements (using a directive) based on route navigation (like spring security with authorize tags)
I do have a directive called navigate-to, that directive allows me to use buttons just like an anchor
<button navigate-to="/users/{{user.id}}">Edit</button>
And I want to determine if the current user is allowed to navigate to the target url (without actually navigating to it).
I can protect navigation with the $routeChangeStart event, what I need is to access the route information (to perform security checks) before routing.
SOLVED:
I have found the way (looking at $route source code) to match the url and obtain the route object (manually), not ideal but it works. Here is the function to get the route information:
var getRouteInfo = function(path) {
var matched = false,
matchedRoute = null;
angular.forEach($route.routes, function(route) {
if (!route.regexp) return;
if (!matched && route.regexp.exec(path)) {
matched = true;
matchedRoute = route;
}
});
return matchedRoute;
};