how can I match these regular expressions? - mysql

Question

I have a url stored in a database. From a given url, i have to fetch data from the database but I'm confused how can I indentify the actual url. It's confusing when the url from the user is dynamic like text or a number.
example:
/user should match the url /user
/user/1 should match the url /user/{id}
/user/name/johndoe should match the url /user/name/{name}
/user/1/johndoe should match the url /user/{id}/{name}
I have tried this one it works for /user/1 i.e with integers but I cannot make it work with string. There's no way to indentify the string parameters. Or is there other way in mysql a workaround.
MOTO: Fetch the content from the database where a given url string matches the url column. Note: the {id}, {name}, {type} are dynamic values.
Controller:
$sanitizedUrl = preg_replace('/\/*\d{1,}/','/{id}', '/user/name/1');
UrlContent::where('url', $sanitizedUrl)->first()->content;
This code can only work with the urls which have numbers only. Example: /user/12/type/12 is replaced as /user/{id}/type/{id}
Database : url_contents
| url | content |
-----------------------------------------------------------
| /user/name/{id} | matches if url is /user/name/1 |
| /user/{id}/{name} | if url is /user/1/john |
| /user/{type}/{name} | if url i /user/{type}/{name} |

Answer 1

You should do it the other way:
function getUrlContent($url)
{
$replacements = [
'{id}' => '\d+',
'{name}' => '\w+',
];
$urlContents = UrlContent::all();
foreach ($urlContents as $urlContent) {
if (preg_match('~' . strtr($urlContent->url, $replacements) . '~', $url)) {
return $urlContent->content;
}
}
return null;
}
$url = '/user/1/johndoe';
var_dump(getUrlContent($url));
Also you may need to cache all built regular expressions for a time to reduce mysql overhead of a roundtrip. If url_contents table grows significantly you may have to add another column which will contain the regular expression itself:
+-----------------+----------------+------------+
| url | url_regex | content |
+-----------------+----------------+------------+
| /user/name/{id} | /user/name/\d+ | ......... |
+-----------------+----------------+------------+