CakePHP use Regex variable capture in routes? - cakephp

Question

In my CakePHP app I have static pages set up like this:
Router::connect(
'/terms',
array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'terms')
);
This will rewrite /terms to /pages/display/terms To make prettier shorter URLs.
Now If I wanted to do this for all my static pages, it would get quite redundant:
Router::connect(
'/terms',
array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'terms')
);
Router::connect(
'/privacy',
array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'privacy')
);
Router::connect(
'/about',
array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'about')
);
With regular mod_rewrite you can do something like this:
/(terms|privacy|about) /pages/display/$1
So I naturally attempted this:
Router::connect(
'/(terms|privacy|about)',
array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', '$1')
);
It does not work. Is there support for something like this, if so how do you do it?

Answer 1

Just off the top of my head, this may solve the issue. To perform a regex match on a portion you need to do so like this:
Router::connect(
'/:page',
array(
'controller' => 'pages',
'action' => 'display',
),
array(
'page' => '(terms|privacy|about)',
'pass' => array('page')
)
);
Notice how the page placeholder in the URL gets extrapolated on in the third parameter, the array. In there we say that it must match the provided regular expression. Also of note is that it also says to pass the page placeholder to the action method. That way it knows which page to render.